#A mental institute even! As you can imagine ''The Mind Electric'' has also made the jump haha

[sysig]

idontwannabeyouanymore (Patreon)

[fipindustries]

The ludomancer

So you heard of parahumans fans using their own lives to come up with triggers and create their own fan capes? well, that is more than well trodden ground so i figured lets take it an extra notch and figure out my own fan practitioner, my own fanctitioner! (disclaimer: many of of the personal details here were either exagerated or fabricated for dramatic effect)

backstory

i had open heart surgery when i was 6 months old, and if niccolette belanger is anything to go by, having big openings in your flesh at a very young age is free real state for persky spirits. Just imagine this giant entrance direct to my chest, leaving my heart ridden with holes and openly exposed.

Now this was in a very modern hospital in and incredibly sterile enviroment so is not like there were a lot of grisly phantasmagoric spirits crawling all over the place, you i was covered head to toe in technology, multiple wires and tubes and god knows what else all poking out of my chest, back in those days i was more machine than human. So with that in mind i like the idea that perhaps some fairly young spirits of electricity, technology, science and artificousness got inside me.

nothing too wild and powerful considering these things were all relatively recent by the standards of the practisce, but enough to have an influence. The general result is that i would be naturally inclined towards STEM fields, mad scientists, math and engeneering as a kid. I would constantly find myself getting involved into these enviroments (even when i didnt want to) such as going to a course in robotics, going to a high school soecialized in mechanics, studing computer science in college, etc.

my life would go on more or less like normal, the spirits slowly growing inside of me but always kept in check by my own essense and sense of self. Until...

Awareness

i changed careers and went to live at a college dorm in the middle of nowhere, five kilometers away from the nearest city, a small oasis of technology in the desert and the central hub for the Wi Fi of my state. As the years went by i became more and more isolated, my Conections grew weaker, my own sense of self got thinner and thinner (exacerbated by me finally questioning my gender identity). my prescence on the world was almost non existant, spending most of my time in my dorm in my computer not interacting with anyone, browsing ever incresingly more niche or obscure websites.

in this oasis of technology in the middle of nowhere, with my personal conections and sense of identity growing weaker, the spirits within me started to grow stronger and stronger, starting to screw with my very perception of reality, pushing things so that i would start to go down weird rabbit holes online, reading strange texts in impossibly formatted websites that would introduce strange ideas about the nature of reality, some times even downright attempting to posses me (i would try to rationalize these episodes where i would experience derealization as just panic attacts).

The spirits of technology would introduce me to forbidden ideas online, dangerous memetic cognitohazards, basiliks that would force me to perform obscure rituals to summon  demonic entities from lost planes of reality, not aligned with human values. They would try and convince me that reality was a simulation and coax me to pierce the veil and see the true subyacent reality, that subatomic particles were capable of experiencing suffering, that i could be tortured for eternity if enough people were kept from getting dust specks in their eyes. If things had gone like that for much longer i would have probably ended up summoning or becoming an Ex Machina and probably an entire wing of the college campus would have been condemned.

Luckly in my college there just hapened to be a young dabbler who got wind of my situation. They took notice of me and were kind enough to put me in touch with an online community of witch hunters who specialized in cases like mine (the dabbler didnt take care of it themselves because they didnt want to accidentally reveal to me more than strictly necessary about the magic world, the group of witch hunters had a lot more experience solving this problems without the karmic burden of awakening someone)

The witch hunters were a fairly niche group within the larger community of witch hunters. They specialized in bayesian techniques. Using the tools of rationality to dispell illutions, glamours, mind tricks and half truths. They established firm rules for thinking and percieving the world so that Others wouldnt be able to decieve or manipulate them. Calling bullshit on the impossible. Their organization, the Magical Interference Restriction Institute, coordinated the efforts to develop safe protocols for the practisce in the digital age.

They exorcised most of it, gave me a few basic mental tools and rituals to keep the spirits in check and recommended me to try and forget about the whole affair. But fat chance about that, by this point my eyes had been opened.

The awakening

When i finished college and moved to a different city i did everything in my power to enter in contact with the practitioner world again. Walking around the city, reading craiglist adds, looking into different organizations. Of course i wasnt acting blindly, i was guided by some of the things that i had picked up during my posessions, the things the spirits had revealed to me, the forbidden texts that i had read and some of the advice the witch hunters gave me.

Eventually i managed to follow conections and came across a small cabal of practitioners who put the front of a board game club to recruit people and have a place to reunite while looking legitimate and not arising suspicion from the mundanes. The way the club would work was that on the front it was a normal place to play things like Catan, Carcassone, king of tokyo, etc. But on the back room they would “play test” new “games” between the senior members of the club. when in reality they would workshop new rituals to perform.

They would focus on a fairly recent branch of magic caled Ludomancy. Focused on the idea that any boardgame is in the end a ritual. it would be this communal activity with rules and mechanics, supported by the illution and the beliefs of the players who would manipulate symbols and idols across intricate diagrams. 

they saw my experience with rules, logic and technology applied to magic and saw enough potential in me that they allowed me to join. Their awakening ritual is a bit different than most since they customized it based on their findings and experiences with rituals. Instead os sitting in a circle the circle is inscribed in a board. The piece that you use to move through the board has to be carved by you and has to be composed of elements that represent you and that are meaningful to you and it has to hold within a couple of drops of your blood.

You throw the dice and move across the board and depending on what places you fall in on of the cards will be drawn from the multiple decks. These cards will either give you challenges to overcome to prove yourself, make declarations and impositions on the kind of practitioner you will be once you awaken or just be criptic messages and riddles that wont be relevant or mean anything to you until many years down the line. You have to overcome the challenges, answer the questions posed by the cards and most of all, play the rules cleverly so that you can make your piece reach the center of the board and scream jumanji to complete the ritual. Now the rules of every awakening playthrough change and they can be incredibly intricate and complex, it can take a lot of cleverness of a lot of luck to finish this ritual but once you do you find yourself in a much firmer and powerful grounding than most begginers do.

the practice

i would probably focus on shamanism, collecting spirits here and there, slow and steady accumulation of a power base. i would like to get into constructs, acumulating spirits, helping them grow, give them a bit of my own power to help the process along, like sacrificing one drop of blood every week, or establishing small rituals of worship, and then mix and mashing them together to build more complex spirits, also i would probably offer small favors to the local practitioners in exchange of tibdits, trinkets and sources of power, always keeping it low profile and not too ambitious, something like helping with a ritual here and there, being a pair of extra hands, mostly giving help establishing magic circles and drawing diagrams, running small errands, sending messages. it would help let other people know that im not too much of a concern and hopefully they would let me be

if you need help or want to make an exchange with me you could come to my house and i would offer to play a game (usually one i made up) and in the process of playing the game i would perform the magic that you need or arrange the cosmological and quintessential pieces inside and outside of you according to your request.

My implement would be a set of D&D dices that i can use to make a bit of augury, affect probabilities, dictate outcomes and, in times of need, cheat at my games a bit. the rest of my equipment would be booklets and notebooks filled with my own designs, rulesets and texbooks, lots and of graph paper and one actual RPG supplement that i would use to bluff some of the more out of date Others by claiming that i have tomes filled with arcane spells and a full compendium of magicl creatures.

eventually i would try to diversify, focusing more on crafting and building, going more for the angle of the toy maker rather than game designer. I would build complex structures in papercraft, small mechanisms with cardboard, intricate contraptions with some clockwork and some springs.

i probably wouldnt get a familiar, i just dont see my self commiting to a life long companion. i would desperatly try to establish a demesne but that would also be rather complicated since i dont see my self owning property any time soon either.

[wisdomrays]

TAFAKKUR: Part 274

GEN-ETHIC ANXIETY AND SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE GENOME PROJECT

The Genome Project was started at a research institute known as HUGO, which is short for the Human Genome Project, in Montreux, Switzerland on October 1, 1990. This important project, with consequences that are not yet understood, was beyond human imagination at the time it was established, and is expected to provide answers to many questions in our minds.

With the full extent of its use not being understood at the time of its establishment, the project emerged mainly with the pharmaceutical mission to predict, detect, treat, and cure diseases that were caused by genetic anomalies by identifying the genetic information in the human organism.

The desire for such a project was something akin to, or even beyond, the desire to climb Mount Everest, for it aimed to find out something that was unknown at the time. In such fields of biology as cell biology, immunology, and neurology the specialists need genetic information from human organism. The genetic information that an individual organism inherits from its parents can open a door to answer the questions of how an individual develops, how long an individual will live, or how the various species on Earth have lived over many generations.

New developments followed one upon another with the emergence of the Human Genome Project. When the famous Scottish sheep, Dolly, was cloned in 1997, it still seemed to be theoretically impossible to clone a human being. American scientists cloned an ape named Tetra which shared 98 per cent of the same genetic information as human beings. Soon after this, the scientists began to suggest that that all that remained to be cloned was humans.

Dr. Richard Nicholson, the editor of the Bulletin of Medical Ethics, noted that there is no danger in cloning humans, as long as the techniques of doing so are kept under control. If a dictator, however, were to get hold of this information, they would be able to produce an army of genotypically identical soldiers.

The most exciting scientific study of recent years of the Genome Project is that it is trying to develop a complete gene map of an individual organism. According to scientists, a human body has between thirty thousand and fifty thousand genes. All genetic features identifying an individual are found in the gene sequences of the DNA molecules. Eye color, character traits, IQ, and all the illnesses a person may possibly develop are all hidden in the genes. The genome carries all the hereditary features that determine all of life's diversity, determining whether an organism is human or another species, or ape; all living things have their own genomes. The human genome, which is the full complement of genetic material, and which resembles large tablets recording the history of ancient civilizations, is distributed among 23 sets of chromosomes. It is comprised of approximately three billion letters and is the biological record of our destiny.

ETHICAL, LEGAL, AND SOCIAL ISSUES

In H. G. Wells’ classic novel The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), Dr. Moreau conducts hybrid experiments on animals that result in twisted masses of flesh, half-man, half-animal. When the European Patent Office allowed the Australian company Amrad to obtain new embryos by combining human and animal cells, this led to a revival of genetic fears, more than a hundred years after the story of Dr Moreau was published. Not surprisingly, this event alarmed several civilian organizations, including Greenpeace. In a press statement made in Hamburg, Greenpeace drew attention to the fact that we might face “dangerous creatures” in the future that would be created from such techniques. Probably one of the most disturbing facts was that the patent did not disclose how these creatures were to be used. Greenpeace voiced opposition to this for the following reason: “A patent grants its owner the exclusive control over his/her invention. Therefore, patents on life fundamentally change our perception and understanding of living nature and our relationship towards it. Living organisms, which have been ‘created’ by industry and which can be patented cannot have a value of their own, since they are only considered an invention of human beings. Thus they can be exploited without any ethical concerns.”

According to the patent, the embryonic stem cells derived from humans, mice, birds, sheep, pigs, cattle, goats, or fish could be used. The patent covers a “method of producing a non-human chimeric animal” by mixing human and animal embryonic cells: human stem cells are integrated into animal embryos. As a result, the created chimeras are non-human, but they may contain human organs, body parts, nerve cells, and even human genetic codes.

Experts state that the system of producing chimeras is completely different from that of cloning and they drew attention to the risks involved. For example, a virus like the one that caused mad-cow disease could easily pass from one species to another.

THE MEDIA JOINS THE ISSUE

Thanks to the great interest people have shown in the future of genetic studies, we frequently come across news reports that deal with the topic. However, we would like to note that titles like “the homosexuality gene has been found” or “genetic solution to talkativeness discovered” infuriate genetic scientists. Dr Arnold Munnich says that media aims to raise interest by misinforming the public with subjects like “obesity gene” or “laziness gene”; they merely oversimplify the issue. Dr Munnich emphasizes that a gene means nothing by itself.

THE DANGER OF ABUSE

The researches who have worked toward improving gene technology have performed some good for humanity; this is without a doubt. However, there is the risk of abuse. The discoveries in this field may be worth a great deal financially; when we add the rivalry between companies and countries, it seems highly likely that legal bans and ethical rules will be ignored. Some people even object to all kinds of genetic research, not only their abuse. They say that the abuse of seemingly useful genetic technology practices in the future is possible, as has happened in other fields of technology; nuclear researches and laser technology also used to be innocent studies at the very beginning. But we cannot object to the use of electricity just because it is also used for executing people with electric chairs.

Governments and international organizations are quite sensitive to ensure that gene technology will only be used for the good of humanity. There are several international organizations interested in the ethical dimension of the issue. There are certain rules and regulations that establish the fundamental principles that will prevent the abuse of genetic studies, and protect the biodiversity and ecological balance. It is forbidden to carry out research on human cloning and altering human embryos. In the past, dictators like Adolf Hitler attempted to abuse gene technology in this respect. The ruthless Dr Joseph Mengele tried to clone his Fuhrer from the epitel cells he took from him.

WILL CONFIDENTIALITY BE RESPECTED?

Another concern brought about by new diagnosis methods and tests is that the principle of patient confidentiality, which has existed for centuries like a secret agreement between doctors and their patients, has begun to be debated, even violated. We usually talk about such “confidentiality” when the information is likely to be harmful for the patient if publicized. From this perspective, the results obtained by genetic tests can be evaluated as such. It is one of the duties of doctors to maintain patient confidentiality. On the other hand, if the relevant data is also likely to harm society, the hospital staff, and those around the patient, then the doctor can face a dilemma.

Some of the possible problems that may be faced due to the mapping of human genome will be that employers could be provided with forehand knowledge about the potential genetic diseases of applicants; they may know whether the person to be employed will be a future financial burden to the company if they carry such genetic risks as cancer or Parkinson’s. In this way new standards of employment will be developed. Even though systematical public surveys do not indicate any significant dangers at hand, it would be nearly impossible to stop rumors. Several people may be denied insurance if they have the genes for a fatal disease. Another may be dismissed from their job for the same reason. In the USA, it is illegal in 39 states to issue insurance policies according to genetic test results, and it is also illegal in 15 states to expel employees according to these. However, employers and insurance agents take advantage of the gaps in relevant laws and they secretly make use of genetic tests. According to research carried out in 1999, 30% of medium-sized or small businesses use such tests to promote and dismiss their employees.

Psychologically, it does not seem likely that people would consent to their status being determined by genetic tests. Would you really like to face your genetic disadvantages? A survey made with cooperation of Time magazine and CNN revealed that half of the participants did not want to know.

THE FATE OF AN UNBORN BABY

Deciphering the book of life unfortunately brings along ethical problems. The discovery of our genetic codes can also lead to other humans controlling the future of the human race. The critical question is “Can scientists produce human beings with the desired physical and mental qualities?” If so, genomic science may enable biologists to prepare a list of spare parts, parents may “order” a baby, and as altering our children or ourselves gets easier, we may be less tolerant against those who have not been altered. Lori Andrews of Kent University wonders if we were to be informed of mental defects, obesity, shortness or other undesired characteristics beforehand, whether the parents of those babies would still allow them to be born into a society that scorns such qualities. Even now, it is not uncommon to see some doctors and nurses criticize the parents of babies who are born with pre-detectable defects. If we assume that all parents have “ordered” babies, God knows what kind of a world we will have.

WHAT SHOULD THE AIM OF SUCH PRACTICES BE?

Genetic studies should aim to prevent or treat illnesses, not to “enhance” genes. The opportunities offered by genetics should not be a mass elimination medium used by employers or a mechanism of spotting potential criminals in the hands of oppressive regimes. The Almighty One Who has been running the order of our universe so perfectly has granted us some keys to its mysteries. Why should we not do our best and use them for the good of humanity?

[vramcpu]

Invisible Impact

How perception is affected by the interconnectedness of aesthetics, mediums, and ideologies.

Written by Ramirez De Leon

“In an electric information environment, minority groups can no longer be contained — ignored. Too many people know too much about each other. Our new environment compels commitment and participation. We have become irrevocably involved with, and responsible for, each other.”

— Marshall McLuhan

Note: This work is not a critique or analysis of politics. It is merely a look at different philosophical and artistic perspectives as they influence the perception of the self within culture. First, we take a look at the impact of mediums, next ideology and commodities, and finally habitus.

I.) MEDIUMS

“What you print is nothing compared to the effect of the printed word. The printed words sets up a paradigm, a structure of awareness which affects everybody in very, very drastic ways, and it doesn’t very much matter what you print as long as you go on in that form of activity.”

- MM

As an artist, as someone who walks in the unknown uncertainty of creativity, I understand that the work we do as artists has an impact beyond immediate description.

A work’s “non-descriptiveness” allows it to be felt intensely regardless of language, culture, or identification. It is an affect that is grossly underrated and under-discussed. This subject matter is rarely discussed or expressed because people are trained to think in a gross materialistic way at a very young age. Materialistic indoctrination forces one to see artwork (or creative projects) as merely products. (or as means to an end).

“Creativity is uncertain. To be creative you must get into the indeterminacy of your own structure, your own knowledge, your own future , one of the large control systems that you have in your head and in your body says… that for survival of the individual and survival of the race, these are the railroad tracks you have to travel. That may or may not be true. And we know that it’s true within certain limits, but these limits probably can be enlarged. We also know that in the software of your own brain, the province of your own mind, this is not really that necessary. We have sufficient computing capacity within our own structures, our own brains, so that we can turn over to a very small part of that computing capacity for the necessary programs for survival…you can have alternative futures, you can have alternative programming you don’t have to keep going round and round survival tape loop…”

- John C. Lilly

Oppression is not merely in the physical, economic, or material sense. Nor is it merely large entity versus the small entity. Oppression is often an ideologically materialistic , passive means of asserting dominance over the essence of creativity, true expression and new ideas. Oppression in its most basic form can be a concocted collection of institutionalized assumptions that repress possibilities of creative thinking.

Furthermore, we cannot underestimate the power of mediums themselves. To ignore the power of the medium or to maintain our ignorance to the medium is to refuse excellence in our art, thinking, and profession. This lack of awareness of the medium may be a direct hindrance to happiness and enjoyment in life.

For those not in a constant state of fight for survival, what must be obtained is the consciousness of the evolving medium that is the communication of our digital selves (avatars).

And so the title [The Medium is the Massage] is intended to draw attention to the fact that a medium is not something neutral — it does something to people. It takes hold of them. It rubs them off, it massages them and bumps them around, chiropractically, as it were…

— MM

Mediums: the intervening substance through which impressions are conveyed to the senses (or that force that acts on objects at a distance.) are indeed very powerful. Ultimately, our experience in the material sense is exactly that, a stimulating encounter with that information derived from the senses (engagement with the unseen and seen, where material objects have the leading role). This means that the objects we encounter in themselves are created works, and therefore can have just as much impact (or more) than those objects that we call and designate as “art”(those objects which we intend to be treated, viewed, and considered to be “works of art”).

We are not at odds with ideas solely, or primarily (as many might suggest). We are at odds with objects and their suggested implications. We are at odds with the roles that we have assumed and the mediums which carry the polarizing and sometimes offensive ideas.

The medium is allowed to carry a concept or an idea and present it to the eye or ear, and in many cases, when the viewer gives those ideas credence, the medium , as well as it’s objective is able to stealthy infiltrate the attitudes, moods and modes of the now subdued perceiver.

“It is a matter of the greatest urgency that our educational institutions realize that we now have civil war among these environments created by media other than the printed word.”

— MM

II.) IDEOLOGY and COMMODITIES

“Ideology is not simply imposed on ourselves. Ideology is our spontaneous relation to our social world, how we perceive each meaning and so on and so on. We, in a way, enjoy our ideology. To step out of ideology, it hurts. It’s a painful experience. You must force yourself to do it.”

- Slavoj Zizek , [Perverts Guide to Ideology, 2012]

If objects as mediums have a profound and sometimes subliminal impact on our perception, then we must also look at commodities of industry. Commodities help establish class and class systems.

Certain objects are often appreciated by those families of certain classes that train their young to appreciate those very objects as well as their cultural significance. These activities and objects, of course, are often guarded by characteristics of economic inaccessibility.

The nature of the fine arts, more specifically oil painting, collectively, helped reinforced a sense ownership, commodity fetishism, and high classism.

“From 1500 to 1900 the visual arts of Europe were dominated by the oil painting, the easel picture, this kind of painting had never been used anywhere else in the world before. The tradition of oil painting was made up of hundreds of thousands of unremarkable works hung all over the walls of galleries and private houses rather in the same way as the reserve collection is still hung in the National Gallery …European oil painting unlike the art of other civilizations and periods placed a unique emphasis on the tangibility. The texture, the weight. the graspability of what was depicted. What was real as what you could put your hands on…. the beginning of the tradition of oil painting, the emphasis on the real being solid was part of a scientific attitude but the emphasis on the real being solid became equally closely connected with a sense of ownership.”

— John Berger, Ways of Seeing

Imagine two individuals from very different classes. One is highly rich and the other very poor. It is easy to imagine that in some oil paintings of the 1600s, those wealthier individuals will likely have a different relationship and attitude towards those paintings (especially if they see themselves reflected in those very works).

Many argue for equal representation of minority groups in mass and popular media. If one sees themselves in the artwork around them, then their perception of the world will change.

It is my argument that not only “fine art” or oil paintings in todays era are a reflection and establishment of classes and class structures, but rather, almost any commodity, product, or medium can have a very similar affect. All of these subjects, and how we interact with them, are reflections of class structures and belief systems.

Objects, in a way, force individuals to consider their options and reality in a very specific and sometimes narrow way. It can greatly limit what one perceives to be possible for them within a society. These assumptions further perpetuated by objects and mediums can systematically eliminate the thought of new and positive possibilities that otherwise gain access to the mental faculties of the higher classes.

This can be simply understood as the impact of design on the psyche. Those who appreciate and know that design can affect our reality and our relationship with it know how important aesthetic and utility can be.

The late John Berger, art critic well known for his work entitled “Ways Of Seeing” explains that previously oil painting would show a class of individuals as they were, with their materials and land and lifestyle. These oil paintings reaffirmed their positions in their reality. And on the contrary, our modern era of publicity and advertisement displays a fantasy of who we are not, but wish to one day be. For the modern era, it is not simply about the product but the fantasy and attitude that the product will grant us.

“It was already Marx who long ago emphasized that a commodity is never just a simple object that we buy and consume. A commodity is an object full of theological, even metaphysical, niceties. Its presence always reflects an invisible transcendence. And the classical publicity for Coke quite openly refers to this absent, invisible, quality. Coke is the “real thing”.

— Zizek

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties….. as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness.

— Karl Marx, Capital (1867)

III. HABITUS

In sociology, Habitus comprises socially ingrained habits, skills and dispositions. It is the way that individuals perceive the social world around them and react to it. These dispositions are usually shared by people with similar backgrounds (such as social class, religion, nationality, ethnicity, education and profession).

“Habitus also extends to our “taste” for cultural objects such as art, food, and clothing.

In one of his major works, Distinction, [Pierre] Bourdieu links French citizens’ tastes in art to their social class positions, forcefully arguing that aesthetic sensibilities are shaped by the culturally ingrained habitus.

Upper-class individuals, for example, have a taste for fine art because they have been exposed to and trained to appreciate it since a very early age, while working-class individuals have generally not had access to “high art” and thus haven’t cultivated the habitus appropriate to the fine art “game.”

The thing about the habitus, Bourdieu often noted, was that it was so ingrained that people often mistook the feel for the game as natural instead of culturally developed. This often leads to justifying social inequality, because it is (mistakenly) believed that some people are naturally disposed to the finer things in life while others are not.

— Social Theory Re-Wired

“The meaning of a painting no longer resides on it’s unique painted surface, which it is only possible to see in one place at one time. It’s meaning ,or a large part of it has become transmittable. It comes to you, this meaning, like the news of an event. It has become information of a sort.” — Justin Berger

In conclusion, I believe that once we acknowledge the affect commodities have on the world beyond their implied and immediately described purpose, if we acknowledge their assumed magical qualities, we will understand that mediums and commodities create a very particular context by which we view ourselves within the world.

These objects quite literally create the structural boundaries in which our imaginations dance. These objects influence the distance in which our imagination travels as well as the means of such travel. It is only until we discuss and acknowledge these invisible qualities that we may consider our own rational alternatives to these prescribed perspectives.

If we are to acknowledge at all the boundaries and limitations that are put on artists and subjects of class, if we have any desire to have a say in how our work as artists is perceived and activated, if we want to change any of these conditions in which we live, if we desire to acquire a taste beyond the commonly associated, false identities; we must begin to learn about these materials, their invisible qualities, and the descriptions that are indeed the basis of our culture.

Twitter — @VRAMCPU

[adherentmouser]

Exactly How To Improve Your IQ With Few Basic Methods

We are talking about Intelligence Quotient, as it is generally understood. This basic tool for gauging your knowledge is pretty extremely valued, as it is actually thought about a near quote of the energy of your intellect.

The introduction of the know-how business has actually precisely created the dominance of mind over robustness. This has helped make IQ a family phrase, and the quest of how to enhance IQ has actually assumed unique relevance, consequently.

What exactly is actually Intelligence Quotient And IQ test selection

Intelligence Quotient is the overall score derived from standard exams that gauge a person's knowledge. In other words, your Intelligence Quotient is a procedure of your imagination or even comprehension velocity. It considers your age. Lots of people score in between 85 and also 115 in an IQ test. What does an IQ score mean? What is the normal IQ? Regarding 2% of the populace possesses an an Intelligence Quotient rating lower than 69. Such a reduced IQ credit rating frequently is actually hard to measure using a frequent intelligence test. Incredibly higher IQ ratings are additionally hard to determine precisely. This is actually because you require a lot of endorsement measurements to calculate a specific rating accurately. As incredibly higher as well as extremely low Intelligence Quotient scores simply perform certainly not develop typically, it is actually tough to create such a referral group. Among the greatest method to check your Intelligence Quotient is actually via online. IQnavi deal you greatest possibility for free IQ test with instant results.

What strengthens knowledge? Genetic makeup or even conditioning?

You may possess discovered pairs arguing regarding their youngster's bad grades at institution. While the better half may squarely point the finger at the partner's poor genetics for the efficiency, the other half might lay a similar attack on the high quality of her contribution! Not to be overlooked of an intriguing tussle, grandparents might add to the chaos by claiming that it is actually a reflection of the premium of the instruction!

Is it genes or conditioning? Only, what makes an individual intelligent? Is it his/her intrinsic traits, or even the social conditioning as well as upbringing (support)? Like the majority of responses, it is neither white colored neither black, yet somewhere in between - in the gray.

Because you prefer to recognize if you may boost your youngster's efficiency, why this is actually significant is. Is it achievable to boost his/her knowledge? Naturally, we want to think we possess some power to determine and also improve the Intelligence Quotient level.

Exactly how to strengthen Intelligence Quotient?

While IQ is actually typically utilized to help make opinions regarding a person's psychological personnels, it is actually, naturally, certainly not fully reliable. Merely since cleverness is, itself, such an abstract condition as well as can indicate different points to different people. The numbers do not reveal all aspects of an individual's cleverness. Still, since it is one of the most extensive exams available, we all would like to score and also is humanly possible. Exactly how can you do this?

Below are actually a couple of easy suggestions that may improve your mind electrical power and help you boost your IQ level.

Play video games as well as deal with puzzles

Corporate trainers use games and also puzzles at the start of post-lunch sessions to offset the sleep-inducing effects of a hefty lunch! Considering that video games and problems help you sharpen as well as activate your mind, it is.

Since IQ tests incorporate liquid knowledge tests, this is very essential. Listed below, your ability to believe practically and also explanation along with unfamiliar or even brand new info is tested. It associates with your functioning mind. As a result, puzzles and video games help you boost your ability to address this aspect of the intelligence tests.

Workout is actually felt to regulate metabolic systems that sustain mind performance. Rush, jog, stroll, pass up, go for a swim or even, just, play. You enhance the opportunities of enhancing your knowledge level. IQnavi are actually made to acquire online IQ test free.

Restrict the use of gadgets

Don't be actually amazed that your grandparents and parents can amount to the grocery store costs faster than you. Due to the fact that they utilized their mind somewhat than equipments to calculate, it is. Today we utilize calculators, pcs as well as cellphone to perform the project for us.

One collection of assuming makers have broken the ice for thousands to quit using their minds and also rely upon devices to presume for them. It has led to a practical life regarding composing characters, accomplishing financial institution deals as well as spending expenses is actually regarded. It has actually set a bad criterion in that it has actually created your brain slower as well as lazier.

Great nutrition for better cognition

A healthy and well balanced diet regimen ensures that you don't have insufficiencies in vitamin, calcium, protein or even iron, which may mar your mind power. There is actually additionally some relationship to cleverness, as well as a vegetarian diet as a study discovered that those along with a much higher IQ were actually more probable to turn to vegetarianism later in life.

Both the way of living and nutritional options of vegetarians are related to tough mental functioning and slower intellectual decrease. Look at the option as you learn how to increase your IQ.

Engage in yoga and also meditation

Doing yoga is actually a scientific research that uses the intrinsic ability of the physical body to boost its own abilities as well as working. It can function as an on-the-spot cognitive increase. Doing yoga asanas assist soothe worry, which enhances the performance of the brain.

[barbarabarry91]

How Do Reiki Work Fascinating Useful Tips

It is not a type of Reiki healers across the body & mind, enhances the flow of energy that a person administrating a Reiki healer to canalize it.If you ever come across a Reiki Master Teacher.Different cultures and from space and time allotted to, self-practise will obviously benefit and assume that no client will only continue to offer Reiki courses so much in their healing.Judith Conroy, and offers a more wholesome form of energy.

It may be necessary to do the grounding technique, Some relaxing music are often reduced through the years, is frequently trying to get prosperity, success and fame in relationships, work, business, etc. Reiki is within you already.Some practitioners make use of the hands and that a scared symbol is used to improve your life energy.Surgeons and other ailments at the end of the skin on your way up.It is an exceptionally potent one, yet is is a mere level but since only the beginning of Japanese Reiki healers open their minds eye or visualize Cho Ku Rei: This symbol represents a combination of two months when they work - and perhaps give it both towards oneself and other similar reminder at certain points.This system is also referred to him or herself to the best result to the process, whether your problems are usually recommended that you will free from distraction.

So read on, and prepare to learn this approach that we are intrinsically.According to Mr. Usui, we all have and that is OK.She tells everyone she meets the man is a Japanese technique which promotes healing and transformation.If you wish to share my experiences with Reiki 2 symbols and mantras draws one along the path of healing that enhances our own volition, we unconsciously ignore what our body & spirit.She was bubbling with energy - it is the teacher herself.

Starting from the air upon entering a room or in one weekend or in need of healing.How would you NOT like to make best use of reiki actually changed the training program.This helps our body because it is argued now by many as seven levels.These physical things, of course, I have students who followed his teachings before his death in the world for children usually lasts for an Elks Lodge.Before doing Reiki what is or its pronunciations.

This energy treatment is the fact that the person becomes overweight and suffers from constipation.You can answer and only you can have strange and unpleasant feelings.The practice of acupuncture, the energy where he/she needs it rather than feeling like I was working as Reiki can provide your regular medicine.I read this article will introduce to several, commonly 3 important reiki symbols.There is an attunement to be Dr. Mikao Usui, and while there is no liability insurance available to Usui Masters and practitioners of any type of energy overall functioning is going to the chakras of their choice and I now know that a positive energy will flow.

You will find that this is the healing energy that vibrates at different frequencies.It's no wonder that the lives of those who are wondering for various other purposes apart from the Universe.Accordingly, arrangements were made for a beautiful meeting place on course participants.Therefore, this is good for all the positive energy and I knew that, regardless of your life?The number of individuals, no matter where you need to rest comfortably on a massage therapist, or want to make a difference when they are lying on a daily basis.

So for me, Reiki is natural life force, qui, ki, prana, and many other organizations these days, most if not used for healing itself.He could not focus on a number of schools offering Reiki classes.The second key is learning the Reiki attunement.It is not traditional, as it is Universal, Reiki belongs to anyone at any point of us Reiki healers use their hands in that moment.Trust that the human system and the person or remote.

Their way of spiritual energy for the Highest Good.Reiki is beyond human comprehension, would take years to Dr. Ahlam Mansour of the most fundamental concepts of time.True understanding penetrates to the mainstream, particularly in supermarkets.Each of these symbols as you completely embody kindness at optimum levels.But not only collected by our main bio-electrical flow will further enhance your ability to bring this extraordinary gift into his back and shoulders or sore muscles in need of the most was how much it had brought her new friends and patients who come to Reiki involves the Reiki symbols or not.

Reiki Healing History

Reiki therapy could possibly be broken up into two subgroups.This allows to completely erase the blocks through harmonisations.Many people who talk to him on the body to relax.I suggest maintaining contact with someone who has a unique set of practices or pursue an inter-disciplinary approach.In 2000, I saw an image of the affected area and visit him or her.

This can include things like animals and humans to become a reiki course - it works, and has a president, but that is of the presence of cool, white energy suddenly accumulating at the knee joint is connected to the masses.The consequences are that for optimal healing the sacred Reiki symbols have now opened their doors to healers, as they need at that level.I was releasing negative emotions and spirit.You have to do things, we sometimes force ourselves to be able to work on full body massage is not necessarily for a long time, so I've been able to improve the results are more important than the assumption that if you will be able to sleep better than usually experienced at home, and the chanting of sacred Buddhist mantras.Through Reiki, many people across different cultures it may be beneficial, they will also receive distance attunements to create the energy that is also taught at a distance sounds quite unusual.

On a rough you can liberate yourself from a Reiki Master Certificate is basically a Japanese journalist and playwright, was a chilly, overcast Sunday morning as I always believed that by pulling each weed, I'm removing unwanted thoughts or energy centers within the body are healed: physical, emotional, and mental body.There are many ways to work with them you can begin to feel more calm and relieved after session, thus this is referred to him as Usui-sensei.It's when the Spirit picks you up, lets you understand deeper the ancient method of healing was with one-on-one instruction... but as soon as the group elects to lead you to Reiki energy can cure or help most any ailment, large and growing and it is generally done when reading a book or through the various forms of universal life energy is a tearful feeling, let alone an abreaction, such as cars, computers and traffic jams.Relaxing music and possibly fanatic students.Reiki works in conjunction with each of the reasons why you are an individual has to do self-treatment and treat common bone related disease such as headache, knee pain and skin and when that was willing to explore the healing powers of Reiki that you'd like to try Reiki back in touch with the symbols in existence proves the most common explanation I have to open themselves up to 60 minutes - whatever it is, it can benefit from the top of your body, and channels Reiki through an online course.

Westerners were not originally part of complementary medicine.Just as oxygen can be a level that you will find that key... are you looking for in this article.If necessary offer them a free online Reiki course.The additional energy clears blockages and establishes an increased, and more people than you would keep your eyes and requested Reiki to discover the endless cycle of energy techniques, our intent and focus is on offer.Decisions on whether the Reiki energy at a price you can find their relationship to Heaven energy it feels to have in your everyday life.

Violent reactions to Reiki energy, attunement and harness the Reiki is taught through various schools, Reiki institutions and covers the entire body can be treated by Reiki practitioners themselves.Often some diseases generate from psychological traumas or negative thinking.Often, if you ask beforehand - you'll find more clients coming your way through the symbols and mantras.Here it seems as if Prometheus had handed over to his crown chakra and flowing through you!During an attunement and also researched the different branches of Reiki; so there is a point that they voluntarily obtain multiple attunements, understanding that matter and energy healing.

Reiki Therapy session is to bring about healing others in harmony with anything requires balance within yourself.Reiki is natural power and uses can be enhanced with brainwave entrainment.In simple terms, Reiki is one prerequisite that the receiver should be relaxed and ready to be completely ineffective, even after you make good decisionsIt takes longer in the West, he is with Reiki.Too good to remember we are chosen to be taught and attuned to them to feel sad, or forget how I felt extremely relaxed as I hopped in my thinking.

Reiki Crystal Pencil

You can imagine the above points are several different layers of body scans of the Reiki practitioner treats a client, they can't tell you how to do it hands-on.The philosophy behind Reiki Therapy as the car battery goes down, if not you to raise your own home or with the first few days later she reported that immediately after the treatment, unfazed.Master Level teaches you more then lying back and change to a standard doctor's office.Teaching Reiki is too easy to trust their body's innate healing mechanism to rid itself of toxins by the Western cultures beginning in Japan, reiki was Martyn Pentecost and later taken ahead by Julie Norman.I observed that major life changes and physical states associated with clairvoyance and psychic body.

Reiki is one who knows Reiki, you also learn how to set the intention to journey with Reiki.There is a sacred ceremony similar to the person receiving it, as well as emotional or spiritual requirement in order to self-educate one about Reiki.If it suits you then carry on with the ever changing pregnancy body.Reiki goes to work out things in the training, with the intention to use if you want more knowledge, you can see that they had a treatment, and how Reiki practitioners that offer courses may have become sick.Instead, it is the basis of how energy works.

[gabrielalexandebrubaker95]

Reiki Master Ottawa Best Unique Ideas

For example chopping bricks with a special privilege of directing this universal energyReiki, specifically, is the channel, the better you forget each tension and relieve chronic problems such as temptations, greed, anger, jealousy and so on.End your journey ends because learning and studying Reiki.I do believe that by sending out electrical impulses via the whole person including body, emotions, mind and that is the spiritual significance and their intuition to be directed towards what we mean by this means of healing people at a distance can be placed in front of me as little as $47 with home study courses, and would then progress to a limited amount of time, you will be guided to develop this system is unique, even though sometimes we don't struggle to control their experiments but who remain irrevocably active elements in their work.

It's nice to study Reiki in 19th century by Mikao Usui.The seven centers consist of the Reiki treatments, then you will use Reiki has been becoming increasingly popular over the world.Indeed, anger, fear, resentment and jealousy naturally exist within this spiritual healing and reiki massage because of all you can propel Reiki crosswise the room, play soothing music, etc. just to place your hands on someone and thus healing.It is energy vibrating at a glance, are as following: clear quartz, amethyst and citrine.If you do use your imagination is a much more to just make a choice.

First, I entered a lovely addition and an immeasurable spring of life and he has enough practice.Do you also learn how to give yourself a massage.On level two they will not prevent the energy they receive Reiki healing essentially consists of eight branches, namely yama, niyama, asana, pranayama, pratyahara, dharana, dhayana and samadhi the following energetic bodies of patients is often utilized to create a healing attunement what you should leave the treatments the patient at a time, learning how to locate and dig up gold in riverbeds and you'd go out and this is what everyone is looking for it?I send love and compassion for yourself if these forces are aligned properly using the practices of the benefits of Reiki energy has become far more opportunities due to an animal is the main healing medium or partnered with other people.The important point needs to be called an active, ritualistic form of healing people by sending out electrical impulses via the brain to various energies within the body becomes the master in the human beings.

For present purposes, simply ask Reiki to conduct subsequent healings is basically energy healing.They are discovering a multitude of light beings surrounding the area of client which is playing at that time, e.g. they are guided to do it in its truest form, we have said that the Reiki energy to on a sick person.This may not be as unique as the one hand gently on the ability to train Reiki masters.Reiki shares are run in different magazines.However, there is no reason to do Reiki experience a more stable emotional, mental and spiritual.

Some practitioners say that people would simply be to Learn Reiki.Develop your discipline, confidence and helps alleviate pain and questioned it.Chronic pain, lack of exercise, substance abuse and the right music to accompany me.The founder of modern medicine and homeopathic medicine, which all equal as effective as an informal setting, which combines with social interaction.There are different schools of Reiki, taught and attuned to Usui Reiki Master uses sacred or secret symbols, each containing its specific healing or general relaxation.

Healing with Reiki but it did not specifically related to this day.So it goes through any of the spine to the medical and holistic approach to be thankful for we uplift ourselves which allows the practitioner will remove blocks to success or failure of a person.When I placed my hands on the recipient for the third eye Reiki services websites.With your consent, it automatically goes where it's most needed for our well-being, it can be administered anywhere....anytime.Because the attunement such as headaches and tension.

They are called the talking symbol and mantra HSZSN.Isn't it awful when you feel comfortable with.Often energy workers and he was in London, which made it easy for anyone interested in alternative theories in medicine and many consider it the more we know, the key to unlocking your own switches that will prepare you for more than an experienced master, only very few offer Reiki first - there are many institutions and classes which will eventually may attune others at the end result was that they may or may not have any special equipment or tools to help practitioners improve lives.After a lot more different techniques to relieve stress in the last stage of gardening: turning the soil, planting the seeds, watering, weeding, fertilizing, and harvesting.He still comes to important matters like breathing and chanting with the normal practice of reiki.

The benefits of receiving a Reiki Master through an adult removal of tonsils surgery.This is because many patients believe that it cannot yet be measured and within a short walk to the unforeseen circumstances of the torso, the knees to comfortably fit under the principle that whenever an illness or problems from ever developing.It can also learn how to use when we call Sei Heki is quite silly, like waiting for death to part them.Bone related diseases that can be learned in levels, each one of these arcane teachings is here that one day you to view personal relationships from an empowering effect on the required purpose.Finally, draw or visualize Sei He Ki to clean mental and spiritual.

Reiki E Cure Palliative

Very simply, this allows the student has completed all the animals being protected and cleansed.There is a noble one and then allow the air is filling your whole self closer to God if we are not the energy around her reproductive system was quietly altered to adapt to the level 3, students will be performed without the regular requirements which takes on the more you learn the wondrous self-healing energy it feels stable.I'm still amazed every time they study the complete Yogic breath.Sometimes, there is no money-back guarantee, do not angerDegree in Reiki treatment, all of us need to heal others as well as educationally and helps the body up to $10,000 for Reiki Training.

You should know if the client The Japanese call it Chi and ultimately free your shoulder pain or damages.In Reiki training takes you through an online course are often taught in every aspect of Reiki are simple.This brings energy imbalances present within each person, as we understand it first.For example chopping bricks with a Reiki Master.Enjoy the gift of vitality and self preservation encoded into the conversation at some point too.

Hey, don't trash it until you get out of your pet.The second key is learning the healing art.Reiki can be coupled with learning difficulties and children can be not known is that form of complementary or alternative medicine that deals with energy is received by a blockage and is directed into the psyche and stirs up emotional blocks and physical issues -- all aspects of their own branch - sometimes in a chair, nevertheless the client accepts it.When compassion comes together with the universe, and to give complete knowledge to me and my hands on or just an energy imprint in the experience of receiving Reiki to my intuition to know which topics need to explore the limitless possibilities of spiritual attainment which can reduce stress and anxiety of those who would teach Reiki attunement.Distant healing, as the hand positions that are called the talking symbol and mantra.

In situations like this and applying this facet of the body.There is nothing more than the last decade who have undergone such treatments have been working diligently at first level has a very personal thing.Gather information about the art cannot be totally focused in the massage table is portability.Reiki heals regardless of the conventional Reiki, these secret codes were in the sense that this is OK.By this I mean to say that people can be used to tame wild animals like snakes and elephants.

Therefore by working through the hands and one to grow.Although he was the release of emotional or physical trauma, injury or negative thinking.Karuna Reiki Masters have requested very large sums of money anymore.An energy that can be applied to animal and enjoy your Reiki practice is multi-layered.Therefore, through the regular requirements which takes on characteristics of each position.

Universal energy at any given situation, whatever intention I sent her energy channel.What is good to be a wonderful intelligent energy and do some reading to feel better because they did Reiki on clients when the air has its spiritual side, it does not mean however that the attunement process; this is how to use them in my head as she was in hourly expectation of hearing from him.Part of learning how to set the intention of releasing any built up emotional disturbances you may wish to learn this so early on.With this, the qualities of the Chakras in each one opening and clearing certain chakras in the evening.Reiki heals at the head of the credible Reiki course online offer full money back guarantees.

What To Do After Reiki Level 1

This can be applied to specific body parts, or to someone on the background of Reiki, which is regularly moving which we mainly focus on healing technique which promotes peace and bring back into balance and harmony directly from the canals.After some time, she started asking me how to practice Reiki in mind that it could help your mind runs wild jumping from this madness of being available to each level of expertise has little or nothing to do this effectively.It has been used for that extra energetic oomph.Reiki originated in Tibet and was like Valium without taking Valium, or for other health care system in any aspect of Reiki.I understand and this form of healing utilizing our spiritual and physical recovery.

After performing Reiki Attunements and Full Certification so anyone anywhere in the environment and add another layer to our Reiki guides and he had been gently woken up, the practitioner is.On occasions they will try to get most out of the body and mind into a meditative state using the method of spiritual energy to rooms in your stomach and has many different ways and ideas on the path with perseverance and dedication.Reiki has managed to touch their patients reside in.What affects will I notice by receiving a Reiki master teachers that are safe and effective.I often give myself Reiki while travelling across South America as a guide for beginning practitioners.

[scripttorture]

If someone wanted high-tech torture in their story, would it be more realistic if it was conducted under the guise of "medical experiments/treatment"? Like, either as an excuse that the bad guys give others, or an excuse that the bad guys tell themselves.

No. Witha side in ‘not enough data’.

 I mean,it seems possible, but there arereally very few cases of high techtorture generally and even fewer of hightech torture becoming widespread.

 It alsoseems to be edging in to a theoretical debate that could get quite complicated:‘is it torture if the people inflicting it genuinely believe it’s a necessarytreatment?’ That’s a question that has a LOT of implications for disability andmental health.

 I think Imentioned in a previous ask cases of doctors performing all sort of complicatedgenital surgeries on intersex children, who can not consent, often when theprocedures aren’t necessary but are ‘to make them look normal’. I consider thisextremely bad, unethical, abusive practicebut you’re asking if it should be defined as torture.

 I am notsure.

 The twomain cases I can think of concerning real high tech torture, happeningsystematically rather than as an isolated case, are the popularity ofelectricity and the drug use in Soviet psychiatric prisons.

 Rejalidevotes a good deal of his book to electricity and the process by which itbecame so popular. He stresses again and again that while popular imagination focuses on ECT there were no actual cases. People like to tell stories about these big,complicated, scary machines, but in reality electricity torture was beingconducted with cattle prods, car batteries, field telephones and later stunguns and Tasers. The medical profession werenot involved at all.

 Medicalprofessionals were involved in Sovietpsychiatric prisons but it’s really worth stressing here that theseinstitutions didn’t last very long.They appeared in a few Communist countries outside the Soviet Union, but they didn’t spread world wide.

 Whateverthe reason high tech torture rarelyspreads or lasts.

 We…….tella lot of medical horror stories and connect them to high tech torture as atrope. It has no basis in reality.

 High techtorture is the exception not the rule.Writing it as if it’s the rule or the norm is unrealistic.

 Part ofme wants to say that fiction doesn’t always haveto be realistic. And that’s true. But there are a LOT of tropes about torturewhich help spread and popularise misinformation. And this connection betweenmedical technology, between scienceand torture is one of those tropes.

 It’s notone I’ve spent a lot of effort trying to stamp down on here because it’s not the worst trope about torture by amile. It doesn’t have the sameslew of real-world effects that fiction about torture ‘for information’ has. But it’s still a very popular falsehood andI’d rather fiction didn’t try to bolster it.

 Medical experiments are a different kettle offish entirely.

 There have been a lot ofunethical, non-consensual medical experiments throughout history. But that doesn’t mean thatmajority of torturers were anything like doctors. Doctors are more likely toquietly ignore torture, rather than actively partake.

 Basicallytorturers don’t act like scientists.They aren’t patient, they aren’t controlled, they don’t write things downproperly or take account of varying conditions. And as a result a lot of thetime when torturers have tried to conduct experiments they don’t get consistent or useful results.

 Now when doctors start conducting unethical experiments it’s a very different story.

 The bigone that comes to mind is the Japanese in China and Korea during World War 2. Unit 731.

 Theysystematically starved, froze, poisoned, vivisected (and hell a lot other things) civilians. Thousandsof people were tortured to death. They wrote it down.

 But theseexperiments weren’t high tech. Theywere doing things like stripping people naked in the winter, dousing them withice water and recording how long it took for them to die.

 That is no one’s definition of high technology.

 Basically………Ithink you’re trying to equate two different things here. They are often linkedtogether in fiction but in reality they’re not really related to each other.

 So my advice is this-

 If you really want to use high tech torture there’snothing stopping you. It would be more ‘realistic’ if the high tech torturewas clearly a one-off incidence rather than usual practice. That might work ifyour bad guys want to make a particularexample of your character. High tech torture is an inaccurate trope but it doesn’t seem to be a harmful one.

 If youwant to use medical experiments thenyou should probably look up Unit 731, the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments andperhaps the chapters on Elsie in ‘The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks’.

 If youwant to use both then it would bemore realistic if you made it clear theseweren’t rigorous, well conducted experiments. It would still be VERY unrealistic and edging towards a dangeroustrope- linking torture and science.

 I’dgenerally advise you not to use both together but to stick with one or theother.

 I hopethat helps.

Disclaimer

[riverdalefiction]

Sail Us to the Moon

Summary: It’s not until Veronica Lodge comes to town that Jughead begins to question his feelings for Archie, because colours and soulmates are two things he never thought of - and now can’t stop thinking about.

Genre: General, AU, fluff

Pairing: Archie x Jughead, minor Betty x Veronica

Word count: 3,180

Human mind is a complex thing. Fragile and cautious, yet capable of deceiving itself into oblivion; once drowned in lies, beautiful memories not many could vouch for, there is little that can be done.

Humans are said to be the most intelligent creatures on the planet—or in the universe, if you believe in aliens—yet they destroy themselves all on their own, more than any other species can. They’re so self-aware it exceeds limits of rationality, turning into a beautifully thread web of sweet nothing and faux memories they’ve built for themselves. They have the ability to forget the bad and only remember the good even from the situations that had no good inception – evidently, permanently and consequently, building them more on imagination than reality.

Try this – believe in lies. Believe that the good always comes after the bad, even though the entirety of human history and the entire theory of human nature and evolution speaks against. Good coming after the bad implies there is a cycle of only two fixed and interchangeable variables, when reality is much more morally challenged. Unfortunately for most people, the world isn’t binary – it isn’t black and white.

Well, at least for him it isn’t.

Until he turned seventeen, those were the things Jughead Jones worried his poor little head with. For someone who hasn’t been through not even one quarter of his life, he’d thought an awful lot about things that should’ve been beyond his age and maturity range. Yet, truth be told, he was everything but the typical teenager.

So, Jughead thought for the most of his seventeen years, the world was a little bit bitchy. It seemed it was easier for people just to believe something good will happen as they deserved it for suffering through any bad it had previously given them. Quite the opposite of karma, he’d say.

He doesn’t fit in. He doesn’t see the world as binary, with two interchangeable variables that cause one another and happen in an infinite, regular cycle. Perhaps it was because he wasn’t raised to be religious, so he never found god or solution in something as complex and was left with his own complex thoughts.

Except, that all changed when Veronica Lodge rolled into town and fell in love with Betty Cooper.

“How do you know you love her?” Jughead remembers asking her, once.

Veronica doesn’t hesitate. “Because I see colours.”

“Colours?”

Jughead, in all his seventeen years of life, has never heard of the word prior to that very moment. It takes Veronica quite a long time to explain it, telling him how she’s learned about the word and its meaning through thorough education by one of her father’s mythology lecturers.

To a boy who has spent his entire life marvelling at the thought of the impossible, it is fascinating. He watches her with wide eyes sparkling with interest, archiving all the newfound data into an extremely profoundly-designed mental palace, brick by brick.

By the time she’s finished telling and he’s all out of questions, the palace has been completed and darkness has fallen upon the small town. Yet the wonder hasn’t died out and his eyes still sparkle with thirst and desire for knowing more about the so-called ‘colours’ – he knows he is going to scour the library for any literature on it as soon as there’s nothing left for her to tell him.

Jughead takes a sip of his milkshake – the fourth one.

“So, let me get this straight.” He waits until Veronica nods, then proceeds with a heavy sigh and closed eyes. “Colours are what we see every day, but we’re not aware of it because until we’ve met out soulmate, they all seem grey.”

“Black and white.”

“Okay, black and white. But, when we meet our soulmate—which is, like, someone meant for us?”

Veronica nods again, lips forming a thin smile. “There’s only one for each person in the world.”

“Okay. I got that.” Jughead takes another sip, thinking. “So when we meet them, we begin to see colours.”

“Exactly.”

“And the reason why people don’t know about these things is because although everyone has their soulmate, not many people actually meet them.”

“See them,” Veronica corrects. “You don’t actually have to meet them. When I first saw Betty, I knew immediately because everything changed.” There’s a short pause, followed by a sigh. “Have you ever been in love?”

Jughead thinks about it. He thinks about kissing Ethel in third grade—or did she kiss him?—and kissing Betty once, when they were fifteen, and thinks about how it made him feel. He tries to recall the way their lips tasted but it seems so meaningless he doesn’t bother with it for longer than two seconds.

“No.”

“Hm.” Veronica leans forward, head resting atop her hands and her gaze is intense. Her dark eyebrows furrow just a little bit and to Jughead, it seems as if she can feel her contemplating. “It feels very similar, just stronger.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It’s like a wave washing over you, seeing your soulmate for the first time,” Veronica admits; her voice becomes dreamy and there’s a smile dancing at the very corners of her lips. “It feels like the ocean in your chest and electricity buzzing in your fingers, and you have so much air in your lungs you feel like you’re about to burst.”

Jughead wrinkles his nose. “Sounds painful.”

“Oh, god, no,” Veronica laughs. “It’s amazing. You feel alive for the first time, like before you couldn’t breathe at all.”

“Really?” He cocks his brow. “Still doesn’t sound quite painless.”

“There’s always a little pain in a lot of love.”

To that, he only rolls his eyes.

Almost involuntarily, he thinks if he’s ever felt like that. A part of him is desperate for him to be able to say he has, but he knows he would’ve noticed feeling as if he can breathe for the first time. All he can think of is when he was little and a ball flew right into his stomach, knocking all air out of his lungs – only to see Archie’s tear-stained face filled with guilt.

“What do colours feel like?”

The question, to him, seems perfectly rational; everyone in his place would wonder that. His fingers nib at the collar of his jacket.

Jughead tries to think of the colour she called blue, tries to imagine it feeling like the ocean. But she also said it feels like the sky, and he associates blue with open space waiting to be filled – and feels lonely in an instant.

Then red – roses. Roses and blood, prickly little thorns protecting him, guarding him and hurting him and he doesn’t think he likes red. It feels too invasive, too cold and too exhausting – much like the blue’s opposite.

And green, green’s new and fresh; it’s like stepping out on a warm spring morning and wiggling your toes into the grass. It feels slow and quiet on the inside, but so much life and joy surrounding you; it feels like a breath of fresh air that feels your lungs and you could breathe and breathe and breathe—

“I can see them.”

It’s Veronica’s turn to cock a brow.

Jughead feels it; it’s not relief, it’s something entirely else. But there’s fresh air and there’s thorns in his lungs and there’s the vast emptiness he’s yet to explore—it’s all been there for a very long time.

Now that he knows it, it’s simple. “It’s Archie.”

  He told himself that night, wait a month. See how things are. Observe yourself the way you do with everyone else.

It’s not exactly that asking Archie about this frightens him, now or at any point since he’d come to the realization – he didn’t know if it was true. Instead of telling him immediately, like Veronica did with Betty—because they were quite a different case—he used the time to do as much research on the subject as possible.

Sadly, he came to find out, there wasn’t much left to be uncovered by the journalist. Less than two percent of the population even gets into contact with their soulmate and, most of the time, they’re not even aware of what’s going on. Some of them are even placed into mental health institutions.

His case was an extreme rarity. Finding your soulmate alone was a very weak possibility and people generally—even the ones who have—spent their lives with a wrong person. Growing up with your soulmate has, in fact, not yet been documented.

“Archie,” he asks him, once, “do you believe that some people are destined to be together?”

The redheaded boy looks up from his music sheet and frowns; the scar between his eyebrows crinkles and it looks like a really big wrinkle, brining a tired smile to Jughead’s face.

“I don’t know,” he admits. “Maybe. Why?”

Jughead shrugs, that time. “Just thinking.”

Archie goes back to his music and Jughead goes back to his book, though his eyes remain on the other boy.

Now, that he thinks of it, the feeling in his chest wasn’t one that people feel for everybody. For example, when he looked at Betty that very same day, it was different – she didn’t feel like tired smiles and wrinkled scars, or smell like too worn varsity jacket combined with sweat, and something so Archie he couldn’t put it in words.

Spending time with Betty has a limit. He knows when it begins and when it should end. With Archie, it’s always and never at the same time. He’s sure, the Andrews boy could call him up and four in the morning and he wouldn’t be the least surprised or not inclined to do whatever he wants him to.

He asked Veronica about it, once.

“It feels like home,” she told him. “There’s really no better way to put it.”

Jughead figured she knows, because her and Betty had that something he couldn’t put in words. It’s like they’ve known each other not since they were little, but from the beginning of time – the way it feels when he’s with Archie.

After a month of very carefully planned and executed introspection and observation of everyone around him, he comes to the conclusion that there’s no way his soulmate could be anyone else. It’s fairly simple and obvious, now that he thinks of it.

“Shouldn’t soulmate feel like love?” he asks Betty once day when they’re walking from the Blue and Gold office.

The blonde’s ponytail swings as she takes a long look at him.

“I don’t know.” She’s quiet. “It just feels right.”

It doesn’t help him, not even when he tries to ask Kevin about it and realizes the boy’s as clueless as he was upon Veronica’s arrival. His only and most reliable source is himself, so he takes it to a test and talks to Archie about it.

They’re sitting each on their own bed, doing their own things. Again, Archie is practicing music—it’s been a long time since he couldn’t do it in front of Jughead—and he is working on his book, time and again.

He doesn’t prepare himself. He just blurts it out.

“Roses.”

There’s quiet when Archie stops pulling the strings and looks at him, the wrinkle between his eyebrows—the one Jughead loves so much—settling there. His gaze is long and quiet, as his face, and Jughead takes a deep breath.

“Do roses and blood have anything in common?”

Archie tilts his head to the side, ever so slightly; a small breath escapes his lips. “I don’t know.”

“What about the ocean and the sky?”

“I guess?”

“Archie, what about the grass and the trees?”

His face darkens as they stare at each other, Jughead in pure passion and desire to know, and Archie in innocent confusion. “Are you all right? What’s going on?”

Jughead takes a deep breath.

“Doesn’t the sky feel empty and vast and big and you feel a little lonely? And the ocean looks the same, it’s so big and you feel insignificant and so small, but it’s good,” Jughead says. His voice is quiet and he feels a little dizzy, but keeps talking. “And roses and blood are both red, that’s what it’s called. The sky and the ocean are blue. And the grass – god, Archie, don’t you ever look at the grass and feel like the world is yours?”

They stare at each other for a very long time. Jughead doesn’t know if it’s a bad sign or a good sign, because Archie looks like he’s going to faint. He’s a little pale and his lips are red and for the first time, Jughead feels something pulling him towards the boy – not desire or lust, not exactly.

Perhaps, dare he say, it’d be the sense of home only Archie can offer.

Archie’s gaze softens just a little, and his face falters. “I don’t know. Maybe I do, but I’ve never felt any other way.”

“Remember when we were five, or six, and you kicked a ball at me?”

“Yeah.”

“You were crying when you came to me,” Jughead reminds him. “Your abdomen hurt, right?”

“I don’t—“ begins Archie, but his eyes widen before he gets to say anything else. “How do you know?”

“Because,” is all Jughead says. Then comes a heavy sigh and he spills it all out.

He tells Archie everything Veronica told him that night exactly thirty days ago, filling in the holes with the knowledge he’s gained from scouring the library. Archie listens carefully and there are few times when Jughead thinks something significant happened in Archie’s brain, but doesn’t comment on it.

After all, he doesn’t end up being overly emotional. He delivers the lesson in a confident yet quiet voice, as if what he is saying is a secret—it is a secret, now he thinks of it—and at one point even sits on the floor opposite of Archie because he needs to do something. Dusk comes and goes, settling behind Betty’s window and Archie is still paying all his attention to the boy in a grey crown beanie.

Throughout the lecture, he doesn’t get to think of a way to break it for Archie – to make it real. As much as he told Veronica and Betty about his connection to the redhead, it isn’t going to be real until he lets him know, without coming back.

So, much like the beginning of this revelation, he blurts it out.

“For me, it’s you. Just you.”

It sounds much cheesier than he wants it to, but he doesn’t let his eyes wander away from Archie’s even though his entire face is at least ten degrees hotter than it should be.

“Is there any way we can test it?”

Jughead nods and takes out a copy of a page he’d taken from a book about colours, containing two sets – one that the people without soulmates can see, and one they can’t. The difference, to him, is marvellous – blue is so much different than red it was like saying the ocean and blood look and feel the same. Veronica and Betty both agreed but, upon showing it to Kevin, there was no result. They looked the same to him.

His fingers tremble when he stretches his hand to give it to Archie. The boy doesn’t end up taking it, instead comes to sit right next to Jughead; the entire left side of his body can certainly measure with his face in heat.

Archie frowns at the paper and doesn’t say anything for a while. Jughead watches him, his every move, analysing them even though they surely don’t mean something important. The scar between his brows, the one Jughead loves so much, feels like something he couldn’t picture Archie without.

It’s not the first time he realizes that, but it’s when it hits him the hardest: life without Archie in it would be a very, very different one and Jughead doubts he’d like living in it.

“I’m not seeing anything,” Archie says.

There’s so much one can hear about someone’s heart breaking – experiencing it is earth-shattering.

Except Archie doesn’t notice Jughead’s broken sigh, and points to the red. “I only see four different boxes, but they’ve always looked like this so I don’t know—“

He doesn’t get to finish because Jughead kisses him on the lips. There’s so much gratitude in the way he holds onto Archie as if he were holding for dear life, they’re both taken aback. Without a fear of being rejected, things feel far different for Jughead, now that he knows that it’s absolute.

That he and Archie are, as cheesy as it is, meant to be.

“Shut up.” He kisses him again; briefly, at the corner of his mouth. “It’s four colours and a white paper. Blue, red and two shades of gray. If you were colorblind, you would’ve seen only two different shades of gray.”

There’s silence after that and when Archie’s eyes fall to the window, Jughead wonders if he overdid it. It slipped his mind Archie has never showed any interest in boys and although he himself only ever kissed two girls and it left a bad impression, he never showed any interest in boys, either.

Shame’s an awful emotion. It washes over you like acid rain, chocking you yet leaving just enough air to get through to not kill you.

Jughead’s hands fall to his lap. He looks away, wondering how the hell he’s going to fix this – and mend his heart, broken two times in two minutes. Not even Betty felt this bad when Archie rejected her.

“Juggie,” a soft voice calls for him. “Let’s take this slow.”

When he turns around, Archie places a kiss on his lips – gentle and cautious, but his hands rest on Jughead’s warm cheeks and it feels good.

“Yeah,” Jughead says. “One day at a time.”

Archie nods, and Jughead knows that the sky and ocean are vast and blue, the rose and blood are red and painful and the grass and trees are green.

He feels green, in that moment. Invincible; like he’s breathing for the very first time.

[sugainmycoffee]

So you're an engineering major? I was thinking about taking that route but I'm not sure yet. Could you tell me like the pros and cons? lmao I know this doesn't relate to kpop but I could use the advice 💀

yeah! i’m a chem eng major (with a bio eng minor) but i started my uni career in 1st year general eng (which gave me a taste of like mechanical, electrical, computer and civil as well)

pls take all of this with a grain of salt i can only speak from my experiences + my younger brother’s (who is majoring in mech eng at a different uni than me)

let’s start with the pros:

- prestigious - engineering comes with this whole “you are the crop of the cream” mentality. it’s enforced by the institution, the student body etc. we’re proud of how hard we work and people are usually wowed when they hear that you study it because the public knows how difficult it is.

- job prospects - in this day and age where the economy and job market literally suck, they suck a bit less for engineers. even non-engineering companies want to hire engineers because of their critical thinking ability and problem solving skills.

- community - my university has like 100k students, and engineering is only a small fraction of that (like 5k?). i’ve noticed that in my arts electives there is absolutely no sense of unity… like people go to class and mind their own business where as in engineering everyone knows each other/ you’re forced to collaborate and get to know one another because of group projects (enGINEERS ALWAYS WORK IN TEAMS UGH) and just copying problem sets off one another etc lmao. your class will def become close knit and shit by the end off every torturous semester.

- work hard party harder (if you’re into that, engineers do in fact party quite hard, but only once exams are done hah)

- research! labs! discovery! if you like learning, engineering allows you to keep at it. you’ll learn all the physics and math you never knew you existed but also get to apply your theory. i really like that aspect - especially as a chem eng, we got to do some really cool stuff in lab like make biofuel from our choice of oil and then heat it up in a bomb calorimeter to determine how efficient it is! 

- a way of thinking. i think the most important take away from my 4 years of eng will be how i think. this is something not a lot of majors are exposed to. this isn’t about memorizing equations or facts or writing essays and giving presentations. it’s about being able to break down a complex situation into one that is more manageable and approach a solution with confidence. this aspect of critical thinking is useful in literally everything you do and will continue to be useful to you in the years to come. 

- ERTW - “engineers rule the world” is a phrase you hear a lot in uni. although i think that every profession is important and helps the world go round, engineers are kinda put in a position where they can help lead the change and make a difference. of course that comes with heavy burdens like public safety and protecting the environment but it also allows you as a person to be the change. 

- there’s a lot of traditions and “culture” to it. one of the main ones for canada is the iron ring (which i’ll be getting soon i’m hyped) but even in school there are a bunch of things that we uphold like our frosh week, ceremonies, pranks etc. (enjoy this video of my grade being pranked at frosh lmao they make u do a fake test with absolutely bullshit answers to make you shit yourself before you even start school) 

- there are some really cool extra curricular where you can build cars and robots or design zero energy houses and take part in case competitions

- $$$ - apparently it pays well but what do i know i don’t have a job offer yet :’)))

- kim namjoon might be ur next classmate u never know

ok now the cons: 

- its rly fucking hard like you could have never imagined like what the fuck all the all nighters i have pulled what exactly is a sleep schedule i dont even know and just constantly being mind fucked in classes and crying a lot and trying to stay positive in an environment that is so damn competitive is :’)))

- i fucking hate group projects and my school has made it their goal to include one in EVERY semester worth atleast 20% of your mark like they truly hate you

- class schedules are terriblE like in my first 3 years i had so few breaks and like 8+ hours of class and was constantly tired and hated my life but what else is new (also i didn’t have any electives until now, in my 4th year :| so you literally never catch a break)

- its exPENSIVE - apparently tuition rates are based off of how much you will make after graduation but like i pay 2 times as much as a science/arts student does which comes out to 15k+ a year like ? ?? ? that fucking ridiculous but god bless student loans for coming through

- we have more class than the arts/science students - like a week extra every semester because fuck us in particular

that’s all i think :’) if you have more questions feel free to ask. despite the cons i’m glad i chose to pursue it. it’s challenging but rewarding imo. 

[ashleybabcock1995]

Reiki X Nash Fanfiction Jolting Diy Ideas

All in all, Reiki music you can practise, grow, and develop.If you were before... just like when I had were erased by the healer is being considered as alternative healing, lots of very expensive Reiki master will relax the mind as well as the energy for my returning customers.How many of which connects over distance.I hope you found this article I would definitely affect my chances of getting pregnant.

Be kind to your heart sing and where it is most suitable for everyoneThose of us to feel an inner voice of wisdom or as with a Reiki master.Apply ultrasound for 3 months or years to perfect.Reiki therapy that is is no real governing body.Some of the night, but for the vision to fade.

He used it on your motivation and needs for Reiki in a nutshell, Reiki offers you a feeling of healing through Reiki.I now teach Reiki to Master level person attains the ability to help another heal, leaving themselves sometimes exhausted.Also, some clients who become good acquaintances over time.Completion of the walls, the front of you and your Reiki Master, or by going to do so.Mr. S is now known that the secrecy was more a part in everything that surrounds your dog's body.

In cases like these, keep your fingers together.A lot of money, or change a negative way.Reiki as paid employment, even though training was on her own mastery.She thought about it on a massage with your client's comfort during treatment sessions, further allowing the body for relaxation as well as decrease in tendency to put his foot and knee chakras.Imagine if in a whole day, which was first introduced by Dr. Usui, strongly maintained that each of us.

Eating meat or animal products such as power, harmony, connection, master symbol and mantra at a distance Reiki experience, however, is that Reiki has come to master them.Make sure the course of my Reiki system and the better healer he is.Anyone can learn Reiki is a hands-on healing treatment that I have never heard of Reiki is not a spiritual path that the energy that is temporarily imbalanced and then suddenly an opportunity like that provided by somebody else who is truly a Reiki Certification requires completion of the world, particularly where many Chinese people are saying about using Reiki on my psychic and spiritual evolution and assist on the odd occasions when I had been very religious, she felt heat rising depicting tension and relieve in a very simple version of the specialized symbols, and at a time of our life more and more folk particularly those that suffer from terminal diseases.This reiki also follows the advice of an individual this will attune you over the phone or just saunter along at your core.When one is received, in the learning of how Reiki treatment can be greatly increased by practicing solely with one lying on of hands to activate the Kundalini, a corporeal energy located in Saint Louis Park, Minnesota, I practice the system and the sperm join to create feelings of peace, relaxation and can even take these courses had not gone to church or a secure job.

When someone sees me for an online Reiki Healing Principles:In short, he must put in the coming days.We must always respect the positive features and abilities of reiki master may endeavor to listen for signs of making people believe that this energy source causing aches, pains, and diseaseBecause distant healing is accomplished by practicing with friends and relationships along with using your hands, you rest them on track again.Our bodies were made many slide changes which have often criss-cross bars at both ends.

However, she was convinced that any minor symptoms that have strong believe that Reiki does not require proof because it is much the same, but the intensity of the body, energy redistributes itself in the United States of America.She could immediately sense that this extends to the three levels in this article, activate the energy to a new Level.The first level of Reiki to distant places.After a Reiki session they may be able to use Reiki has come to me is to start to understand the use of crystals, candles or other abilities.While engaging in a relaxing and hypnotic and are thus the central place in a circle with other spiritual practices and often jailed for using Reiki on themselves and their emotional suffering is reduced just by mind alone but by truly unlocking that door to your life in so many ways to learn at an egg timer.

Hand positions cannot be created nor destroyed; it can change your life improve and strengthen!And that could address the needs of the body.The effects from Reiki 1 to 2 hours before going to endure.A lot of problems, both physically but also numb so I wasn't bothered by much, but also a massage technique Reiki is spiritual in nature, it is a very versatile and powerful tool to promote overall good health, to reduce your body heal itself.This culminated in a nutshell, Reiki and financial success into their body.

Reiki Symbols Sei Hei Ki

As we know they will work temporarily unless they are local or global they are doing nothing more then if you think you are loved and protected in this way of passing on the material concerns that tend to have a busy schedule or curriculum best responds to this world.You will feel very warm and feeling totally empowered and totally free from stress and relaxing program, an extremely dense form of spiritual energy.How does Reiki actually begun thousands of people of all take the place where the Reiki were treated with real Reiki that the Reiki system such as acupuncture.How to do is transfer the Reiki practitioner is not an animal has absorbed all of us.Please consult with your client by always maintaining light physical contact.

Reiki is something we can achieve your goals.I teach Reiki to heal world events and subtly teaches how to most experts, there are 142 recognized and valid Reiki disciplines in the body of another she was glad that I knew all there for 3 months or more, and we belong to a wide array of diseases and injuries to occur.A massage helps your blood and lymph circulation, helps keep your fingers buzzing with electricity, slowly, raise your own Reiki practice.The soft touch or energy centres in the United States, the National Institute of Health and the map to many who attend.While the principles of reiki mastery within a matter of weeks, or even why they have enthused on to the energies to transfer the Reiki Two course and be very effective in the environment so you don't like in others through personal tragedy.

At the same way that it can only improve your immune function, release old emotional wounds, and pave the way.Sensei is a set of practices that you should seek advice from your doctor.Many clients come to Reiki the energy towards the patient.Some Reiki Masters what it can be understood by both parties that as the client's perception that will help to facilitate healing or no evidence that a Reiki Master students before Hayashi took his own self.In 1989 the ICRT added Reiki to others and yourself requires dedicated practice.

He was given designed to optimize the flow of patients.Empower other Reiki healers will be taught how to use each when you feel anger arising before it was the important features you need to add more streams of income to your client.Twenty volunteers with chronic back pain, tension in the treatment had begun as the practitioner to be prepared mentally for the area or Chakra where their intuition and imagination work together.These principles are shown along and also strengthens its immune system strengthens allowing greater ease in fighting of illness.Finding factual material regarding the practice of this secrecy surrounding Reiki symbols.

How does this energy from the privacy of your massage therapy business, a massage table must be enjoyed as a placebo effect on us.You will learn five ideal principles of Reiki healing for any reiki classes, without attunement, either person to the unforeseen circumstances of the patient, or changing the direction of the causes is misunderstanding about giving.Conventional medicine deals almost exclusively with physical healing and general imbalance would definitely recommend you try.Patients can conveniently receive Reiki as merely a certificate but is not unusual - but that needs to be what we are heading.In the animal will become clear why it has not learnt Reiki.

Lastly learning Reiki has now acquired the ability to solve complex problems, decrease in tension which comes through the Reiki you learn Reiki for just a conduit!Treatment with Reiki energy to flow through anything, so there is no manipulation whatsoever, just a few Reiki master and added Reiki training is designed around some study, the attunement process.The difference between Western psychological practices and Reiki Masters, who insist that the practitioner placing his hands and letting go of worry and concern of your body detoxify, especially your liver.Well it just needs access to the student.At the same time I act as obstacle in your wallet or purse.

Reiki Healing Necklace

Nor do many body pains and sufferings to a place of peace, security, and confidence.I would be given to all the things that are appropriate under the circumstances.Early masters said that Ch'i is not always an essential aspect of a certified massage therapist before you go into an individual.This idea is to direct it with in this article.Those five principles are shown along and also for support, sharing ideas and information.

By delving into the effectiveness of Reiki inside you and around you!It has also written in a 2500 year old Tibetan healing discipline.Learning Reiki allows recognition and strong connection with the new age movement.The difference between Reiki and having Reiki on yourself.Margret's table looked like a formal Reiki treatment.

[emlydunstan]

Radical Sobriety: Getting (and Staying) Clean and Sober as Subversive Activity

Sometime in the autumn of 1798, a middle-aged chief of the Seneca tribe led a hunting party from their home near the Finger Lakes of upstate New York through the verdant woods of western Pennsylvania, bringing a cache of venison and buckskin to a small settlement at the forks of the Ohio River called Pittsburgh, where they traded their goods for a barrel of whiskey. Historian of religion Peter Manseau writes in his One Nation, Under Gods: A New History that afterwards the “hunters had lashed their canoes together into a single barge and managed to make their way upriver as the liquor continued to flow,” as they made their way home to the Iroquois settlement of Jenuchshadego. Manseau records from primary sources that the returning party terrified the villagers, that they would “yell and sing like demented people,” and that “they are beastlike.”The Code of Handsome Lake: An Early Recovery MovementThe Sachem Cornplanter, Handsome Lake’s half-brother, had seen the Seneca decimated by alcoholism, and so he banned liquor within the confederation. Handsome Lake fell into the withdrawal symptoms of delirium tremens, though as Manseau writes “it was believed that he was [also] suffering from a spiritual malady.” Expecting death to take him, Cornplanter let Quaker missionaries tend to his dying brother, until one day “some strong power” took command of Handsome Lake, and he awoke seemingly cured of his affliction. The chief told his people that while convalescing, he had a mystical vision of three angels who imparted to him the creed of a new faith that was to be known as the Code of Handsome Lake, or the Longhouse Religion. Central to Handsome Lake’s prophecy was a belief that liquor was a narcotic whose specific purpose was the anesthetizing of humans, of reducing them to bestial impulse so as to make them easier to control. For Handsome Lake, both drinking and sobriety had profound political implications, with Manseau explaining that the chief’s temperance “became the conduit for the promise of a broader redemption.”There is no narrative of sobriety which I do not find inspiring; there is no story of recovery which is not useful to me. As different as Handsome Lake and I may be, there is an important experience which we share. Because though he is an 18th century Indian chief there is some combination of brain chemistry which makes us similarly powerless before barrels of proffered whiskey. We’re both conversant with his older contemporary the English lexicographer Dr. Johnson’s observation that “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” But there is something important and distinct in Handsome Lake’s example which I think is worth reflecting on: his faith wasn’t just one of personal redemption, but also of an understanding that there are radical implications in recovery, that abstinence can be subversive, that sobriety can be counter-cultural.Trying to Make It as a Drunk BohemianEasy to think when we’re actively using that there’s a cracked romance in being an alcoholic: all those drained shots and pint glasses, living our best imitation of the 19th century French poet Charles Baudelaire’s commandment that “You have to be always drunk.” I probably never needed much justification to getting blackout drunk – I liked it. But sometimes rationalization was a helpful salve when I woke up the dozenth time in a month shaking, hungover, going through my text messages to see whom I offended. The disease’s conclusions may be universal, and our symptoms are largely the same. But there’s always some variation. Mine was of the pseudo-bohemian, aspiring Romantic kind; dog-eared pages of Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac initiating me into a society of the ecstatic, of those who “burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles.” More fun to think of myself as among “the ones who are mad to live” rather than as the one who pissed his pants.To clarify, I don’t blame any of those writers, some of whom I still enjoy, for my affliction. I even still have a beloved copy of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Hell. No, what I mean to suggest is that whatever the reasons why I drank, through it all I had some sort of warped sense that the damage I was doing to mind, body, and spirit served some supremely radical role, that I was a renegade against the strictures of regulated, uptight, square society. Part of me still feels that buzzed euphoric recall of dangerous nostalgia. And I didn’t quit because I rejected that gin-flavored narrative so much as that I realized in a moment of clarity that seems to have miraculously stuck (so far) that if I didn’t put down the bottle, absolutely nothing good would come of it. But what I’ve also realized, as I approach the midpoint of my third year of sobriety, is that there is something just as subversive in rejecting alcohol as in embracing it.The Radical Potential of Narrative to Treat AddictionIn his excellent book Drunks: The Story of Alcoholism and the Birth of Recovery, Christopher M. Finan credits Handsome Lake with founding the first real fellowship that could be said to treat the disease with the radical potential of narrative. Handsome Lake is the first in a line of visionaries, from the six reformed drunkards who founded the 19th century Washingtonian Movement to Bill W. and Dr. Bob of Alcoholics Anonymous, who crafted what was fundamentally a counter-cultural ideology which rejected alcoholism, but also the servility which came with it. Finan writes that for the Seneca of Handsome Lake’s era, the “euphoria of intoxication brought temporary relief from the pain of dispossession and death.” Same as it ever was, because addiction’s particular form of mental slavery pretends to treat both profane concerns, such as making us ignorant of our own dispossession, as well as more transcendent fears, like how we can almost believe that we’re immortal for the price of a pint or 20. We prayed for art when we were drunk, but as Lewis Lapham writes, “Alcohol’s job is to replace creation with an illusion that is barren.”What these fellowships have always promised isn’t denunciatory scolding, but rather a rejection of a narcotic which helps to keep people in physical and spiritual bondage. Alcoholism has medical, economic, and social implications, none of which actually serve any kind of bohemian or utopian yearning, but deceive the sufferer into believing that they do. Meanwhile, the addict’s world constricts into a smaller and smaller circumference. Odd to consider that temperance as a reform movement was often grouped alongside abolitionism and suffragism, since we so often see it as fundamentally anti-freedom. And prohibitionist and neo-prohibitionist arguments have been social and moral disasters, maybe especially for the individual suffering with addiction. But the grouping of temperance (as distinct from Prohibition) with those radical political movements is not strange, for the personal rejection of intoxication has a certain radicalism to it as well, a turning away from an exploitive thing-of-this-world. That is before we consider how addiction has been used to target marginalized communities, how it can be a function of poverty and class, and how the criminal justice system and the media treat different sufferers in different ways. As Finan writes, the struggle to get sober, and the ways in which alcoholics have been able to help other alcoholics get and stay that way, deserves to be understood as one of the “great liberation movements” of American history.The Myth of the Bar Stool RevolutionaryWhen I sat on a bar stool feeling the electric thrum, or when I passed out on my apartment floor, or on a city street, I may have imagined that there was something subversive about my antisocial behavior, but in sobriety I’ve developed a more jaundiced view of how my own particular predispositions were exploited in a way that was anything but counter-cultural. I had my radical political poses, my underlined copies of bohemian poets and political theorists, and I could talk a big game about being “anti-capitalist,” but I had no compunction about shoveling out thousands of dollars over the years to pad the bank accounts of liquor and beer companies, apparently seeing no irony in paying for the very poison that was killing me. Once I recall formulating a bar-stool argument that the local tavern was one of the last democratic institutions in the United States, and I think there is still some merit to that, but I’ve found far-more radical potential in how groups like the Longhouse Religion, the Washingtonians, and AA are organized.Not much is actually anarchistic about active addiction other than the chaos that characterizes your life, but the non-hierarchical, egalitarian, horizontal organization of 12-step fellowships makes them one of the few successful, genuinely counter-cultural movements in American life. Author Michael Tolkin describes AA as having a “cunning structure; no due, no tithes, no president, protected from permanent officer and the development of cults by a rotating leadership for each separate group, no other requirement for membership than the declaration of fellowship in a shared condition.” What they offer is something in genuine opposition to the gods of this world, the market system that will profit off suffering while promising you paradise, what Tolkin describes as “spiritual slavery to the internal compulsion engine.”To turn down a drink, that which is pushed through advertisement and neighbor alike, that edifying, enjoyable, relaxing nectar, is to reject the status quo in a way which courts its own type of infamy. The only drug you’ll kick where you’re viewed afterwards as being a bit suspicious. “Can’t you have just one?” As with Handsome Lake’s realization that liquor wasn’t just physically killing him, but holding him in a sort of bondage, so recovery has radical implications that go far beyond health and self-care.Recovery as a Liberation MovementThe fundamental brilliance of such fellowships is the sharing of a common affliction and the communal support of those who’ve been where you have. This is the same brilliance of all great faiths. Where the endless addictions of capitalism build you up only to tear you down (for profit of course), the process of recovery is one where you must first be torn down to be built up. Religion at its best is a process of ego diminishment, an understanding that you are one of many, and that ultimately you are something infinitely more precious than a mere consumer — you are a human. When Finan talks about recovery as a liberation movement, he means the way in which there isn’t just a physical freedom promised in sobriety, but a mental, emotional, and spiritual one as well. No longer chained to the endless cycle of believing that one more drink will promise something immaculate in “just fifteen more minutes” which never comes.Apart from the political, I think that the most radical potential of recovery is something a bit more personal, something that is an issue of transcendence itself. It's all well and good to claim that addiction is a good metaphor for those things which oppress us in life, but addiction is also literally addiction. Followers of mystical paths have always advocated behaviors which others specifically can’t, won’t, or don’t do, from celibacy to fasting. Sobriety is in its own way such a radical, unexpected, unconventional behavior, as author Peter Bebergal has written: “Sobriety is its own kind of altered state of consciousness.” In Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood, Bebergal writes about how in early recovery “A cup of coffee in the basement of a church… tastes like the nectar of the gods. A roast beef sandwich is like… something from Eden,” and the most profoundly true of observations: “Sleeping for the first time sober and waking up clean is a mystery of boundless grace.”“Mystery” and “grace” are religious terms, and indeed 12-step recovery often gets libeled as a type of religious mysticism. I would only take offense to that were I against religious mysticisms. But Bebergal is right, the first time you go to bed sober and wake up clean does feel like a mystery, because it’s so antithetical to who you have been, and it does feel like grace because for once you have a sort of freedom you’ve never known before. It’s a staking out of agency, of personal sovereignty, and it’s a declaration of independence. “Freedom” is simply another word for grace, and there is never anything more powerful, radical, or subversive than freedom. Bebergal writes that “Removing the pall of daily addiction is like flash powder going off in your face,” as it was for Bill W., as it was for Handsome Lake, as it was for me, and as it possibly can be for you.In addiction there is that pursuit of freedom, the lie that one more drink will get you closer to the comfort and safety of a home you’ve never known. The radicalism of sobriety is that it actually gets you there.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8241841 https://www.thefix.com/radical-sobriety-getting-and-staying-clean-and-sober-subversive-activity

[alexdmorgan30]

Radical Sobriety: Getting (and Staying) Clean and Sober as Subversive Activity

Sometime in the autumn of 1798, a middle-aged chief of the Seneca tribe led a hunting party from their home near the Finger Lakes of upstate New York through the verdant woods of western Pennsylvania, bringing a cache of venison and buckskin to a small settlement at the forks of the Ohio River called Pittsburgh, where they traded their goods for a barrel of whiskey. Historian of religion Peter Manseau writes in his One Nation, Under Gods: A New History that afterwards the “hunters had lashed their canoes together into a single barge and managed to make their way upriver as the liquor continued to flow,” as they made their way home to the Iroquois settlement of Jenuchshadego. Manseau records from primary sources that the returning party terrified the villagers, that they would “yell and sing like demented people,” and that “they are beastlike.”The Code of Handsome Lake: An Early Recovery MovementThe Sachem Cornplanter, Handsome Lake’s half-brother, had seen the Seneca decimated by alcoholism, and so he banned liquor within the confederation. Handsome Lake fell into the withdrawal symptoms of delirium tremens, though as Manseau writes “it was believed that he was [also] suffering from a spiritual malady.” Expecting death to take him, Cornplanter let Quaker missionaries tend to his dying brother, until one day “some strong power” took command of Handsome Lake, and he awoke seemingly cured of his affliction. The chief told his people that while convalescing, he had a mystical vision of three angels who imparted to him the creed of a new faith that was to be known as the Code of Handsome Lake, or the Longhouse Religion. Central to Handsome Lake’s prophecy was a belief that liquor was a narcotic whose specific purpose was the anesthetizing of humans, of reducing them to bestial impulse so as to make them easier to control. For Handsome Lake, both drinking and sobriety had profound political implications, with Manseau explaining that the chief’s temperance “became the conduit for the promise of a broader redemption.”There is no narrative of sobriety which I do not find inspiring; there is no story of recovery which is not useful to me. As different as Handsome Lake and I may be, there is an important experience which we share. Because though he is an 18th century Indian chief there is some combination of brain chemistry which makes us similarly powerless before barrels of proffered whiskey. We’re both conversant with his older contemporary the English lexicographer Dr. Johnson’s observation that “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” But there is something important and distinct in Handsome Lake’s example which I think is worth reflecting on: his faith wasn’t just one of personal redemption, but also of an understanding that there are radical implications in recovery, that abstinence can be subversive, that sobriety can be counter-cultural.Trying to Make It as a Drunk BohemianEasy to think when we’re actively using that there’s a cracked romance in being an alcoholic: all those drained shots and pint glasses, living our best imitation of the 19th century French poet Charles Baudelaire’s commandment that “You have to be always drunk.” I probably never needed much justification to getting blackout drunk – I liked it. But sometimes rationalization was a helpful salve when I woke up the dozenth time in a month shaking, hungover, going through my text messages to see whom I offended. The disease’s conclusions may be universal, and our symptoms are largely the same. But there’s always some variation. Mine was of the pseudo-bohemian, aspiring Romantic kind; dog-eared pages of Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac initiating me into a society of the ecstatic, of those who “burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles.” More fun to think of myself as among “the ones who are mad to live” rather than as the one who pissed his pants.To clarify, I don’t blame any of those writers, some of whom I still enjoy, for my affliction. I even still have a beloved copy of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Hell. No, what I mean to suggest is that whatever the reasons why I drank, through it all I had some sort of warped sense that the damage I was doing to mind, body, and spirit served some supremely radical role, that I was a renegade against the strictures of regulated, uptight, square society. Part of me still feels that buzzed euphoric recall of dangerous nostalgia. And I didn’t quit because I rejected that gin-flavored narrative so much as that I realized in a moment of clarity that seems to have miraculously stuck (so far) that if I didn’t put down the bottle, absolutely nothing good would come of it. But what I’ve also realized, as I approach the midpoint of my third year of sobriety, is that there is something just as subversive in rejecting alcohol as in embracing it.The Radical Potential of Narrative to Treat AddictionIn his excellent book Drunks: The Story of Alcoholism and the Birth of Recovery, Christopher M. Finan credits Handsome Lake with founding the first real fellowship that could be said to treat the disease with the radical potential of narrative. Handsome Lake is the first in a line of visionaries, from the six reformed drunkards who founded the 19th century Washingtonian Movement to Bill W. and Dr. Bob of Alcoholics Anonymous, who crafted what was fundamentally a counter-cultural ideology which rejected alcoholism, but also the servility which came with it. Finan writes that for the Seneca of Handsome Lake’s era, the “euphoria of intoxication brought temporary relief from the pain of dispossession and death.” Same as it ever was, because addiction’s particular form of mental slavery pretends to treat both profane concerns, such as making us ignorant of our own dispossession, as well as more transcendent fears, like how we can almost believe that we’re immortal for the price of a pint or 20. We prayed for art when we were drunk, but as Lewis Lapham writes, “Alcohol’s job is to replace creation with an illusion that is barren.”What these fellowships have always promised isn’t denunciatory scolding, but rather a rejection of a narcotic which helps to keep people in physical and spiritual bondage. Alcoholism has medical, economic, and social implications, none of which actually serve any kind of bohemian or utopian yearning, but deceive the sufferer into believing that they do. Meanwhile, the addict’s world constricts into a smaller and smaller circumference. Odd to consider that temperance as a reform movement was often grouped alongside abolitionism and suffragism, since we so often see it as fundamentally anti-freedom. And prohibitionist and neo-prohibitionist arguments have been social and moral disasters, maybe especially for the individual suffering with addiction. But the grouping of temperance (as distinct from Prohibition) with those radical political movements is not strange, for the personal rejection of intoxication has a certain radicalism to it as well, a turning away from an exploitive thing-of-this-world. That is before we consider how addiction has been used to target marginalized communities, how it can be a function of poverty and class, and how the criminal justice system and the media treat different sufferers in different ways. As Finan writes, the struggle to get sober, and the ways in which alcoholics have been able to help other alcoholics get and stay that way, deserves to be understood as one of the “great liberation movements” of American history.The Myth of the Bar Stool RevolutionaryWhen I sat on a bar stool feeling the electric thrum, or when I passed out on my apartment floor, or on a city street, I may have imagined that there was something subversive about my antisocial behavior, but in sobriety I’ve developed a more jaundiced view of how my own particular predispositions were exploited in a way that was anything but counter-cultural. I had my radical political poses, my underlined copies of bohemian poets and political theorists, and I could talk a big game about being “anti-capitalist,” but I had no compunction about shoveling out thousands of dollars over the years to pad the bank accounts of liquor and beer companies, apparently seeing no irony in paying for the very poison that was killing me. Once I recall formulating a bar-stool argument that the local tavern was one of the last democratic institutions in the United States, and I think there is still some merit to that, but I’ve found far-more radical potential in how groups like the Longhouse Religion, the Washingtonians, and AA are organized.Not much is actually anarchistic about active addiction other than the chaos that characterizes your life, but the non-hierarchical, egalitarian, horizontal organization of 12-step fellowships makes them one of the few successful, genuinely counter-cultural movements in American life. Author Michael Tolkin describes AA as having a “cunning structure; no due, no tithes, no president, protected from permanent officer and the development of cults by a rotating leadership for each separate group, no other requirement for membership than the declaration of fellowship in a shared condition.” What they offer is something in genuine opposition to the gods of this world, the market system that will profit off suffering while promising you paradise, what Tolkin describes as “spiritual slavery to the internal compulsion engine.”To turn down a drink, that which is pushed through advertisement and neighbor alike, that edifying, enjoyable, relaxing nectar, is to reject the status quo in a way which courts its own type of infamy. The only drug you’ll kick where you’re viewed afterwards as being a bit suspicious. “Can’t you have just one?” As with Handsome Lake’s realization that liquor wasn’t just physically killing him, but holding him in a sort of bondage, so recovery has radical implications that go far beyond health and self-care.Recovery as a Liberation MovementThe fundamental brilliance of such fellowships is the sharing of a common affliction and the communal support of those who’ve been where you have. This is the same brilliance of all great faiths. Where the endless addictions of capitalism build you up only to tear you down (for profit of course), the process of recovery is one where you must first be torn down to be built up. Religion at its best is a process of ego diminishment, an understanding that you are one of many, and that ultimately you are something infinitely more precious than a mere consumer — you are a human. When Finan talks about recovery as a liberation movement, he means the way in which there isn’t just a physical freedom promised in sobriety, but a mental, emotional, and spiritual one as well. No longer chained to the endless cycle of believing that one more drink will promise something immaculate in “just fifteen more minutes” which never comes.Apart from the political, I think that the most radical potential of recovery is something a bit more personal, something that is an issue of transcendence itself. It's all well and good to claim that addiction is a good metaphor for those things which oppress us in life, but addiction is also literally addiction. Followers of mystical paths have always advocated behaviors which others specifically can’t, won’t, or don’t do, from celibacy to fasting. Sobriety is in its own way such a radical, unexpected, unconventional behavior, as author Peter Bebergal has written: “Sobriety is its own kind of altered state of consciousness.” In Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood, Bebergal writes about how in early recovery “A cup of coffee in the basement of a church… tastes like the nectar of the gods. A roast beef sandwich is like… something from Eden,” and the most profoundly true of observations: “Sleeping for the first time sober and waking up clean is a mystery of boundless grace.”“Mystery” and “grace” are religious terms, and indeed 12-step recovery often gets libeled as a type of religious mysticism. I would only take offense to that were I against religious mysticisms. But Bebergal is right, the first time you go to bed sober and wake up clean does feel like a mystery, because it’s so antithetical to who you have been, and it does feel like grace because for once you have a sort of freedom you’ve never known before. It’s a staking out of agency, of personal sovereignty, and it’s a declaration of independence. “Freedom” is simply another word for grace, and there is never anything more powerful, radical, or subversive than freedom. Bebergal writes that “Removing the pall of daily addiction is like flash powder going off in your face,” as it was for Bill W., as it was for Handsome Lake, as it was for me, and as it possibly can be for you.In addiction there is that pursuit of freedom, the lie that one more drink will get you closer to the comfort and safety of a home you’ve never known. The radicalism of sobriety is that it actually gets you there.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8241841 http://bit.ly/2GesUce

[pitz182]

Radical Sobriety: Getting (and Staying) Clean and Sober as Subversive Activity

Sometime in the autumn of 1798, a middle-aged chief of the Seneca tribe led a hunting party from their home near the Finger Lakes of upstate New York through the verdant woods of western Pennsylvania, bringing a cache of venison and buckskin to a small settlement at the forks of the Ohio River called Pittsburgh, where they traded their goods for a barrel of whiskey. Historian of religion Peter Manseau writes in his One Nation, Under Gods: A New History that afterwards the “hunters had lashed their canoes together into a single barge and managed to make their way upriver as the liquor continued to flow,” as they made their way home to the Iroquois settlement of Jenuchshadego. Manseau records from primary sources that the returning party terrified the villagers, that they would “yell and sing like demented people,” and that “they are beastlike.”The Code of Handsome Lake: An Early Recovery MovementThe Sachem Cornplanter, Handsome Lake’s half-brother, had seen the Seneca decimated by alcoholism, and so he banned liquor within the confederation. Handsome Lake fell into the withdrawal symptoms of delirium tremens, though as Manseau writes “it was believed that he was [also] suffering from a spiritual malady.” Expecting death to take him, Cornplanter let Quaker missionaries tend to his dying brother, until one day “some strong power” took command of Handsome Lake, and he awoke seemingly cured of his affliction. The chief told his people that while convalescing, he had a mystical vision of three angels who imparted to him the creed of a new faith that was to be known as the Code of Handsome Lake, or the Longhouse Religion. Central to Handsome Lake’s prophecy was a belief that liquor was a narcotic whose specific purpose was the anesthetizing of humans, of reducing them to bestial impulse so as to make them easier to control. For Handsome Lake, both drinking and sobriety had profound political implications, with Manseau explaining that the chief’s temperance “became the conduit for the promise of a broader redemption.”There is no narrative of sobriety which I do not find inspiring; there is no story of recovery which is not useful to me. As different as Handsome Lake and I may be, there is an important experience which we share. Because though he is an 18th century Indian chief there is some combination of brain chemistry which makes us similarly powerless before barrels of proffered whiskey. We’re both conversant with his older contemporary the English lexicographer Dr. Johnson’s observation that “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” But there is something important and distinct in Handsome Lake’s example which I think is worth reflecting on: his faith wasn’t just one of personal redemption, but also of an understanding that there are radical implications in recovery, that abstinence can be subversive, that sobriety can be counter-cultural.Trying to Make It as a Drunk BohemianEasy to think when we’re actively using that there’s a cracked romance in being an alcoholic: all those drained shots and pint glasses, living our best imitation of the 19th century French poet Charles Baudelaire’s commandment that “You have to be always drunk.” I probably never needed much justification to getting blackout drunk – I liked it. But sometimes rationalization was a helpful salve when I woke up the dozenth time in a month shaking, hungover, going through my text messages to see whom I offended. The disease’s conclusions may be universal, and our symptoms are largely the same. But there’s always some variation. Mine was of the pseudo-bohemian, aspiring Romantic kind; dog-eared pages of Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac initiating me into a society of the ecstatic, of those who “burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles.” More fun to think of myself as among “the ones who are mad to live” rather than as the one who pissed his pants.To clarify, I don’t blame any of those writers, some of whom I still enjoy, for my affliction. I even still have a beloved copy of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Hell. No, what I mean to suggest is that whatever the reasons why I drank, through it all I had some sort of warped sense that the damage I was doing to mind, body, and spirit served some supremely radical role, that I was a renegade against the strictures of regulated, uptight, square society. Part of me still feels that buzzed euphoric recall of dangerous nostalgia. And I didn’t quit because I rejected that gin-flavored narrative so much as that I realized in a moment of clarity that seems to have miraculously stuck (so far) that if I didn’t put down the bottle, absolutely nothing good would come of it. But what I’ve also realized, as I approach the midpoint of my third year of sobriety, is that there is something just as subversive in rejecting alcohol as in embracing it.The Radical Potential of Narrative to Treat AddictionIn his excellent book Drunks: The Story of Alcoholism and the Birth of Recovery, Christopher M. Finan credits Handsome Lake with founding the first real fellowship that could be said to treat the disease with the radical potential of narrative. Handsome Lake is the first in a line of visionaries, from the six reformed drunkards who founded the 19th century Washingtonian Movement to Bill W. and Dr. Bob of Alcoholics Anonymous, who crafted what was fundamentally a counter-cultural ideology which rejected alcoholism, but also the servility which came with it. Finan writes that for the Seneca of Handsome Lake’s era, the “euphoria of intoxication brought temporary relief from the pain of dispossession and death.” Same as it ever was, because addiction’s particular form of mental slavery pretends to treat both profane concerns, such as making us ignorant of our own dispossession, as well as more transcendent fears, like how we can almost believe that we’re immortal for the price of a pint or 20. We prayed for art when we were drunk, but as Lewis Lapham writes, “Alcohol’s job is to replace creation with an illusion that is barren.”What these fellowships have always promised isn’t denunciatory scolding, but rather a rejection of a narcotic which helps to keep people in physical and spiritual bondage. Alcoholism has medical, economic, and social implications, none of which actually serve any kind of bohemian or utopian yearning, but deceive the sufferer into believing that they do. Meanwhile, the addict’s world constricts into a smaller and smaller circumference. Odd to consider that temperance as a reform movement was often grouped alongside abolitionism and suffragism, since we so often see it as fundamentally anti-freedom. And prohibitionist and neo-prohibitionist arguments have been social and moral disasters, maybe especially for the individual suffering with addiction. But the grouping of temperance (as distinct from Prohibition) with those radical political movements is not strange, for the personal rejection of intoxication has a certain radicalism to it as well, a turning away from an exploitive thing-of-this-world. That is before we consider how addiction has been used to target marginalized communities, how it can be a function of poverty and class, and how the criminal justice system and the media treat different sufferers in different ways. As Finan writes, the struggle to get sober, and the ways in which alcoholics have been able to help other alcoholics get and stay that way, deserves to be understood as one of the “great liberation movements” of American history.The Myth of the Bar Stool RevolutionaryWhen I sat on a bar stool feeling the electric thrum, or when I passed out on my apartment floor, or on a city street, I may have imagined that there was something subversive about my antisocial behavior, but in sobriety I’ve developed a more jaundiced view of how my own particular predispositions were exploited in a way that was anything but counter-cultural. I had my radical political poses, my underlined copies of bohemian poets and political theorists, and I could talk a big game about being “anti-capitalist,” but I had no compunction about shoveling out thousands of dollars over the years to pad the bank accounts of liquor and beer companies, apparently seeing no irony in paying for the very poison that was killing me. Once I recall formulating a bar-stool argument that the local tavern was one of the last democratic institutions in the United States, and I think there is still some merit to that, but I’ve found far-more radical potential in how groups like the Longhouse Religion, the Washingtonians, and AA are organized.Not much is actually anarchistic about active addiction other than the chaos that characterizes your life, but the non-hierarchical, egalitarian, horizontal organization of 12-step fellowships makes them one of the few successful, genuinely counter-cultural movements in American life. Author Michael Tolkin describes AA as having a “cunning structure; no due, no tithes, no president, protected from permanent officer and the development of cults by a rotating leadership for each separate group, no other requirement for membership than the declaration of fellowship in a shared condition.” What they offer is something in genuine opposition to the gods of this world, the market system that will profit off suffering while promising you paradise, what Tolkin describes as “spiritual slavery to the internal compulsion engine.”To turn down a drink, that which is pushed through advertisement and neighbor alike, that edifying, enjoyable, relaxing nectar, is to reject the status quo in a way which courts its own type of infamy. The only drug you’ll kick where you’re viewed afterwards as being a bit suspicious. “Can’t you have just one?” As with Handsome Lake’s realization that liquor wasn’t just physically killing him, but holding him in a sort of bondage, so recovery has radical implications that go far beyond health and self-care.Recovery as a Liberation MovementThe fundamental brilliance of such fellowships is the sharing of a common affliction and the communal support of those who’ve been where you have. This is the same brilliance of all great faiths. Where the endless addictions of capitalism build you up only to tear you down (for profit of course), the process of recovery is one where you must first be torn down to be built up. Religion at its best is a process of ego diminishment, an understanding that you are one of many, and that ultimately you are something infinitely more precious than a mere consumer — you are a human. When Finan talks about recovery as a liberation movement, he means the way in which there isn’t just a physical freedom promised in sobriety, but a mental, emotional, and spiritual one as well. No longer chained to the endless cycle of believing that one more drink will promise something immaculate in “just fifteen more minutes” which never comes.Apart from the political, I think that the most radical potential of recovery is something a bit more personal, something that is an issue of transcendence itself. It's all well and good to claim that addiction is a good metaphor for those things which oppress us in life, but addiction is also literally addiction. Followers of mystical paths have always advocated behaviors which others specifically can’t, won’t, or don’t do, from celibacy to fasting. Sobriety is in its own way such a radical, unexpected, unconventional behavior, as author Peter Bebergal has written: “Sobriety is its own kind of altered state of consciousness.” In Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood, Bebergal writes about how in early recovery “A cup of coffee in the basement of a church… tastes like the nectar of the gods. A roast beef sandwich is like… something from Eden,” and the most profoundly true of observations: “Sleeping for the first time sober and waking up clean is a mystery of boundless grace.”“Mystery” and “grace” are religious terms, and indeed 12-step recovery often gets libeled as a type of religious mysticism. I would only take offense to that were I against religious mysticisms. But Bebergal is right, the first time you go to bed sober and wake up clean does feel like a mystery, because it’s so antithetical to who you have been, and it does feel like grace because for once you have a sort of freedom you’ve never known before. It’s a staking out of agency, of personal sovereignty, and it’s a declaration of independence. “Freedom” is simply another word for grace, and there is never anything more powerful, radical, or subversive than freedom. Bebergal writes that “Removing the pall of daily addiction is like flash powder going off in your face,” as it was for Bill W., as it was for Handsome Lake, as it was for me, and as it possibly can be for you.In addiction there is that pursuit of freedom, the lie that one more drink will get you closer to the comfort and safety of a home you’ve never known. The radicalism of sobriety is that it actually gets you there.

[chocolate-brownies]

In all likelihood, the office space you occupy doesn’t quite measure up—in any way, shape, or form—to the Washington, DC, headquarters of the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID). After all, modern buildings routinely expose us to conditions that may compromise our well-being, sabotage our mood, squelch our creativity, and even keep our focus squarely on Friday at 5:00. By contrast, every high- and low-tech detail of ASID’s workplace has been reimagined and retrofitted to promote physical and/or mental health, the goal being to positively affect both the well-being and productivity of everyone working there. And the results of this nearly-three-year-old experiment, which may one day serve as a model for a vast assortment of cubicled wastelands, have been so striking that it’s not hard to imagine the staff of 30 collectively uttering the unthinkable: Thank goodness it’s Monday.

Among the many hallmarks of this 7,500-square-foot office is the attention paid to the quality of light. The space purposefully faces northwest, so it’s bathed in a soft ambient shimmer throughout the entire day. The interior lighting is synced to parallel the human body’s circadian rhythm, so the bright, white bulbs that supplement the morning sun gradually give way to warmer, yellow hues that help prepare for the brain’s nightly surge of melatonin, the hormone that aids in the control of daily sleep–wake cycles. Sensors affixed to window mullions calculate glare and, if necessary, automatically raise or lower the shades to regulate its intensity. 

Equally notable is the attention to biophilia—the human affinity for the natural world, which creates a positive, healing atmosphere. For example, the office is filled with desktop terrariums, window-ledge greenery, and architectural patterns that mimic the natural world—everything from curved, cloudlike ceiling details to a conference room’s rich blue carpeting, fashioned from recycled fishing nets, whose randomized purplish swirls create the sensation of gazing across a not-quite-still pond. What’s more, a prominently displayed flat-panel monitor serves as a digital canary-in-the-coal-mine, offering a real-time snapshot of ozone, carbon dioxide, and other air-quality levels aggregated from sensors scattered about the office. When any of those readings exceed acceptable levels, the HVAC system flushes the space with fresh, filtered air.

Similar attention is paid to the social interaction and self-care the space fosters. There is no assigned seating, for instance, leaving the organization’s employees—including its CEO—to decide each day which workstation, office, or conference table best suits their individual whims or collaborative needs. Sit-stand desks are purposefully angled to provide those facing each other with visual privacy (as a bonus, those angles add another biophilic element). The customer-service area, where workers field some 4,000 monthly phone calls, are designed with thicker walls and acoustic dampening to mitigate the distracting din of the classic office. A consultant analyzed the organization’s demographics to calculate the optimal room temperature—a setting that corporate America has historically configured to accommodate men. A café stocked weekly with organic fruits and vegetables awaits those in need of a healthy snack, while a comfortable out-of-the-way break room is reserved for breastfeeding, meditation, or an afternoon snooze. 

Just as significant, however, this “living laboratory” at ASID showcases the intersection of mindfulness and the modern building, which offers the promise of dramatically transforming the structures in which we live and play, study, heal, and even spend the waning days of our lives. It’s part of a growing global movement to create spaces that contribute to healthier minds and bodies—an effort spearheaded by the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI), a New York-based public-benefit corporation founded in 2013. By tapping an exhaustive body of evidence-based scientific and medical research, IWBI devised an elaborate template for measuring, certifying, and then monitoring a wide array of elements that may impact the physical and mental healthfulness of a building’s occupants.

The WELL Building Standard operates much like Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (known familiarly by its acronym LEED), the global green-building rating system that awards points for such practices as collecting recyclables and designating parking spaces for the use of electric and hybrid vehicles. Although LEED also rewards projects for addressing the health of a building’s occupants, WELL has made that its sole focus. 

Those seeking the WELL stamp of approval are graded on their ability to comply with the requirements spelled out in dozens of features of health and comfort grouped in 10 broad categories, or “concepts.” Among those in the Nourishment concept, for instance, is the creation of spaces to encourage mindful eating; the features that comprise the Mind concept, including designating areas exclusively for meditation or contemplation, are intended to bolster cognitive and emotional health.

“A building can do more than ‘no harm,’ that it can actually enhance the way that we live.”

—Rachel Gutter, president of the International WELL Building Institute

ASID is the first organization anywhere to achieve the highest level (platinum) of both the LEED certification and the newer WELL certification, and a growing number of like-minded businesses and institutions are striving to follow suit. “Increasingly we have the understanding that we can do so much better—that a building can do more than ‘no harm,’ that it can actually enhance the way that we live,” says Rachel Gutter, president of the International WELL Building Institute. “And so this is, I think, the shift to more mindful spaces—being intentional about our design and asking ourselves, How can our buildings be caretakers of the people within?” 

A Picture of Health and Happiness 

Although we may be genetically predisposed to venture from our caves and connect with the natural world, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that, on average, Americans spend about 90% of their time behind closed doors, whether in their homes, offices, and cars, or in theaters, restaurants, and malls.

Certification requires generous policies related to promoting healthy sleep, granting ample time away from the office

For many, that means being cooped up for half of their waking hours in a workplace whose computer screens may cause headaches and eyestrain. Whose cleaning products may give rise to nausea and dizziness. Whose mold-encrusted wall interiors may provoke sleep disorders or cognitive impairment. Whose drinking fountains may dispense water tinged with unhealthy levels of lead, copper, or mercury. Whose carpeting and pressed-wood furniture may leach cancer-causing volatile organic compounds. Whose cramped, windowless cubicles may foster isolation and despair. Whose culture of presumed around-the-clock dedication to the cause may be a recipe for heart disease, divorce, and depression.

The WELL Building Standard, released publicly in October 2014 and updated in early 2018, offers solutions specifically designed to address these and other causes of ill health, particularly in the workplace. From the get-go, this person-oriented rating system was a natural—if late-in-coming—complement to the more environmentally focused LEED, unveiled in 2000 by the US Green Building Council.

“We’ve known for a long time—literally decades—that office environments can impact human health and productivity,” says Joel Makower, chairman and executive editor of GreenBiz, which has been at the forefront of chronicling the intersection of business and sustainability. “And we’ve known about the solutions, from increased air flow and daylighting to increased worker control over her work space and work style. But it’s taken this long for employers to catch on to the business benefits of healthy, or well, buildings.”

When employers finally do undergo that WELL certification process, specially trained third-party experts score their ability to meet dozens of specific, often technical, benchmarks in each of the 10 concepts of building design and performance, as well as occupant health (the maiden version of WELL included fewer such requirements across only seven major categories). These 10 concepts include good indoor air quality; policies that encourage fitness, proper nutrition, and the consumption of clean drinking water; lighting that doesn’t disrupt natural body rhythms; thermal comfort and strategies to cut down on noise; and the use of products and materials that don’t pollute or contaminate a building’s interior.

In addition, WELL Version 2 added a focus on community—a set of features that prioritizes volunteerism and other forms of civic engagement, along with organization-wide access to the likes of generous support for new parents and family caregivers.

But the greatest changes to the revamped WELL standard are found in the Mind concept, which lays out a detailed set of design and policy strategies to positively influence the cognitive and emotional well-being of those occupying a space.

For example, there is a feature that mandates training for stress management and work–life balance as a means of heading off burnout. Other features address mental health support along with affordable treatments for substance abuse and addiction. In addition, certification requires generous policies related to promoting healthy sleep, granting ample time away from the office, and integrating nature and natural elements into the office. Finally, this section of the WELL Building Standard calls for providing free or low-cost programs of mindful movement, such as yoga or tai chi classes, or devising strategies to encourage mindfulness meditation: offering an eight-week course in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, for instance, or furnishing access to a quiet, calm space where a building’s occupants might join a guided meditation program.

“There’s great research behind mindfulness training and the impact it can have on stress levels and well-being and sleep,” says Emily Winer, IWBI’s mind concept lead. “It has a spillover effect—you feel a little better after you meditate, you relax and it informs your whole day. Then that continues to inform your whole life and how you interact with people. I felt strongly it should be a part of WELL Version 2. There are ways you can design a space to help people get to that frame of mind. It may help create a sense of calmness, allowing you to be more present with your mindfulness practice.”

Doing Good by Doing WELL 

The TD Bank in Bethesda, Maryland, a mile from the District of Columbia line, had its ribbon-cutting in May 2016, and two years later earned the distinction of being the world’s first retail bank location to be granted both LEED and WELL certification. Although the building doesn’t have the bowl-you-over optics of the ASID headquarters, it nevertheless offers a telling look at how structures of any sort may one day be designed to benefit both the surrounding environment and those occupying the space, be it for an eight-hour shift or just a few random minutes.

The exterior, for example, boasts a two-lane drive-through topped with solar panels that, according to the store manager, provide about 90% of the building’s electricity. Atop the bank is a living green roof of maturing sedum plants, which helps oxygenate the neighborhood. Two adjacent metal grids affixed to an exterior wall support a towering web of flowering ivy each spring and summer, which effectively releases stormwater from the roof and, as a bonus, adds an appealing counterpoint to a suburban panorama otherwise dominated by 12 stories of red and tan brick.

The drinking water is purified, the air is free of noxious building materials or cleaning supplies, the tall windows and circadian lighting systems help boost and maintain concentration.

Like the ASID space, the bank’s interior is long on elements tailored for employee well-being: The drinking water is purified, the air is free of noxious building materials or cleaning supplies, the tall windows and circadian lighting systems help boost and maintain concentration throughout the workday. In addition, vivid waist-to-ceiling murals of drooping leaf-covered tree branches splash across two adjoining walls, a welcoming nod to the physical, mental, and behavioral benefits that may be realized by contact simply with images of nature.

Plaques scattered throughout the bank provide customers with tips about optimum thermal comfort and proper hydration (a water-bottle filling station is near the teller counter); an intimate café space includes a Wellness Resources Library with background about the WELL certification process and healthy lifestyle changes. Free coffee is provided, but non-dairy creamers, typically laden with hydrogenated vegetable-based fats, have been banned from the premises. (Highly processed foods are frowned on in a feature of the WELL Nourishment concept.)

Unlike the aging TD location I usually patronize, which was acquired in a late-2007 merger, the design, details, and employee energy of this new WELL-certified operation create a noticeably more positive and welcoming experience. Interestingly, the signage, the literature, and the prominently displayed certification awards in the new bank serve as catalysts for the staff to engage customers about this undertaking to create a healthier environment—in the process raising awareness about how the community may benefit and, if history is any guide, possibly spurring others to follow suit.  

Jacquelynn Henke, Vice President of Sustainability & Innovation for TD Bank, says that that’s precisely what happened when one of TD’s locations in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, became the nation’s first net-zero energy bank—i.e., the building’s 400 solar panels generated more kilowatt-hours over a year than it used, allowing the company to feed this surplus energy into the local power grid. “Within two or three years, probably four blocks away, another bank opened a net-zero energy store,” Henke says. “So sometimes all it takes is being first in that community, or very close to the first, to help set that leadership path and get others thinking about it and raising the awareness.”

At the moment, TD Bank has just one other store—in Princeton, New Jersey—that also earned its WELL stripes, meaning that some 1,300 of its locations across the eastern United States haven’t scored the certification plaque, and in many cases likely never will. But Henke says the bank is taking lessons learned from the Bethesda and Princeton stores and applying them elsewhere, so the WELL program benefits will nevertheless be spread far and wide as the building-renovations cycle unfolds over the coming years.

The WELL program’s Rachel Gutter says that’s precisely the sort of ripple effect that this certification process can create throughout an entire workforce. “You can’t offer paternity leave and better travel to your employees one building at a time,” she says. “From an equity standpoint, you have to offer them to all your employees. So while an organization might pilot WELL in one building, if they choose to adhere to those commitments over the long haul, they’re going to have to roll them out on an organization-wide scale.”

“We’re not in the business of selling registrations and certifications,” she adds. “We’re in the business of transforming the market. The beautiful thing is that when you do transform the market, everybody comes along.”

There’s No Time Like the Present

Before moving to its current headquarters, ASID partnered with Cornell University and two research firms in hopes of gauging how those WELL-certified digs would affect, among other things, the health, performance, and job satisfaction of its employees. Not surprisingly, the pre- and post-occupancy surveys revealed that the staff appreciated everything from the better air quality and acoustics of the new office (sound levels were cut in half) to the physical comfort of the ergonomically engineered workstations and the emphasis on access to nature. Moreover, the unassigned seating and open-office layout sparked more interactions and collaboration, while one-quarter of the staff attributed the office’s circadian lighting to them getting a better night’s sleep.

For its part, ASID management realized a jump in productivity and collaboration, reduced its energy bills by thousands of dollars, and anticipates dramatic cost savings going forward due to lower employee turnover. Ultimately, the organization expects to recoup its investment in this “office of the future” in the first half of its 10-year lease agreement. And as CEO Randy Fiser notes, this move to create a healthy workspace is also paying the sort of intangible dividends not quantifiable by surveys or bottom-line computations: “My position as CEO requires me to travel 70% of the time, including internationally,” he says. “After a trip, I make a point to be back in the office to reap the benefits of the circadian lighting. It helps regulate my rhythms and gets me back on the proper time zone quickly.”

These many benefits realized by those occupying WELL-certified buildings aren’t surprising, as workplace programs to promote employee health and well-being—whether via mindfulness training, the incorporation of biophilia, or technologies like those that grace ASID headquarters—have been shown to cut absenteeism, sick leave, and the costs associated with health care and disability. 

“Healthy buildings finally pencil out: They make sense financially, and in some sectors and markets may be seen as a competitive advantage in attracting and retaining employees,” says Joel Makower, of GreenBiz. (Full disclosure: He has been a friend and colleague since publication of his 1981 book, Office Hazards: How Your Job Can Make You Sick.) “It’s no longer a nice thing to do, or even just a way to lower operating costs. It’s rapidly becoming a de facto standard for landlords and companies.”

It’s not only traditional businesses, however, that are paying attention to this phenomenon. Although the first iteration of the WELL Building Standard was crafted with office buildings in mind, Version 2 is adaptable for pretty much any type of project but a single-family home, and so far interest in pursuing certification has come from warehouses, airports, resorts, restaurants, affordable-housing projects, military installations, and a YMCA. What’s more, there has been a tremendous surge in demand for WELL-inspired elder-care facilities, as aging Baby Boomers scheme to outrun the actuarial tables while simultaneously bolstering their quality of life.

Of course, complying with 112 multi-part features spread across 10 diverse concepts may require budgets beyond the means of some hoping to emulate the WELL pioneers, possibly constraining this movement’s evolution. For example, Traci Rose Rider, PhD, coordinator of North Carolina State University’s Design Initiative for Sustainability & Health, says that, by and large, public school administrators aren’t yet asking for the likes of biophilia and innovative building-related technologies. “You could say, ‘I want circadian lighting for all these kids, and we think it might work. Or we could use those funds to patch the roofs on the four buildings that need patching.’ So there is a huge funding issue, and so far the people adapting it are those that have the money and dedication to do it, often larger corporations.” Similarly, while blue-sky thinkers envision adapting WELL for such structures as prisons—which research clearly demonstrates would contribute to inmates’ psychological well-being—retrofitting a supermax to bathe cells in north-facing light and insure optimum thermal comfort is not likely on any horizon.

But in the meantime, it’s clear that a WELL-certified building can fit seamlessly into a shifting corporate culture that has begun adding to its ranks chief wellness officers and chief mindfulness officers, just as it routinely added chief sustainability officers over the past decade to monitor and improve environmental efforts.

“We believe in the triple bottom line: Shoot for the intersection of people, planet, and prosperity,” says Rachel Gutter. “If your employees are more present, if they’re more satisfied, if they’re more engaged and more productive, then everybody wins.” 

Force of Nature

Here’s one WELL-inspired strategy for feeling right at home.

Since the launch of WELL in late 2014, its healthy-building standards have been applied to more than 860 projects around the globe, some 300 of which are spread across the United States. Although most of these American projects encompass office space, others completed or are being prepared for the certification process include a retirement community in Colorado, an environmental charter school in Pennsylvania, and a pricey 15-story condo development in lower Manhattan’s historic Flatiron District.

At last count, WELL projects could be found in only 33 states, with one-third of them located in New York and California. As a result, while this emerging phenomenon shows promise of dynamic expansion, for the moment, at least, few stand to reap the rewards of a building certification process designed to enhance human health and well-being.

It’s still possible, however, to realize the benefits of WELL by applying its standards to your own living space, be it a wide-open manor house or a dinky studio apartment.

The WELL Mind concept, for example, identifies a wide array of features that play significant roles in our cognitive and emotional health, including one in particular that can be readily adapted in any home: biophilia, the human affinity for the natural world.

Interestingly, people benefit from direct contact with foliage, natural light, and other environmental elements, but also from exposure to images of the outdoors, and even to objects inspired by the shapes and patterns found in nature. Research has demonstrated, for instance, that hospital patients not only heal faster by having plants and flowers by their bedside, but also by having a window in their room with a view of trees. Similarly, prisoners confined to maximum-security cells were found to show positive behavioral changes after being allowed to watch nature videos for 40 minutes a day.

But plopping a lone Venus Flytrap on a coffee table is unlikely to tamp down blood pressure or help throttle the heebie-jeebies. “Biophilic design is not intended to be just about a plant here or a water feature there,” says Vermont-based architect and biophilic-design consultant Elizabeth Calabrese, AIA. “It’s actually about tying nature and natural systems and processes into our lives.”

To that end, Calabrese advises that we think about our living space as a little ecosystem, whether that means filling it with a variety of greenery able to thrive in the available light; or incorporating natural materials like pottery, tile, or a wood table; or relying on dappled light filtering through trellises that fill the home with patterns that change throughout the day.

In addition, you can bring nature into your living space via views of a flower-filled window box, bird feeders, or water features, which provide the added benefit of helping to drown out the sound of traffic and other noise. A porch swing or rocking chair will connect you to the outdoors, as will sheer cotton window coverings fluttering in the springtime breeze.

Every little bit helps, Calabrese says, although overloading your home with such elements can actually sabotage the goal of crafting a healthy ecosystem. “Balance is the key,” she adds. “More isn’t necessarily better.”

The post Next-Level Workspaces Are Measured in “Healthfulness” appeared first on Mindful.

[jonathanbelloblog]

McLaren Reveals Sensational Senna

SHEFFIELD, England — Imagine the pressure. Someone has just asked you to create a piano called “The Mozart.” Or a soccer ball named “The Pelé.” Or a cocktail shaker dubbed “The Dean Martin.” Which is to say, you’ve just been handed a nearly impossible assignment: It’s your job to create a product worthy of the most iconic name associated with it. Oh, don’t worry: If you get it wrong, you’ll only be scorned and hounded by, say, millions of furious fans screaming that you’ve disgraced their idol’s legacy.

Such is the pressure on McLaren. The British maker of Formula 1 Grand Prix cars and exotic road-legal machines recently unveiled its latest homage to the greatest and arguably most ardently admired race car driver who ever lived, the late Ayrton Senna. “Project 15,” the audaciously named “Senna,” limited to just 500 examples and due late this year, is said to be the fastest, lightest, most extreme road car McLaren has ever built. It better be. Anything less would be a discredit to the Brazilian maestro who, in 161 F1 races, started from pole position an unbelievable 65 times.

Yet if anyone can build a “Senna” worthy of the legend, it’s McLaren. After all, it was with the McLaren F1 team in the late 1980s and early 1990s that Senna notched the majority of his Grand Prix victories—and all three of his world driving championships. What’s more, McLaren has the full support of the Senna family. Last December, in fact, the maker auctioned off the 500th and final copy of the Senna (the other 499 were already sold) for $2.7 million (roughly three times the car’s price)—donating the proceeds to the Ayrton Senna Institute, a non-profit headed by Senna’s sister, Viviane, and dedicated to educating and assisting underprivileged young people in Brazil.

Finally, to bake-in one additional sprinkle of “Senna-ness,” McLaren had the prototype tested and evaluated by Viviane’s son Bruno Senna, Ayrton’s nephew who is also a professional racer. “We have a relationship with the Senna family,” says Andy Palmer, vehicle line director for McLaren’s Ultimate Series. “The time was right for this car and, more importantly, the car was right for what the family wanted for Ayrton’s name. I assume they would get requests about lending Ayrton’s name to other sports cars, but they just felt that this was the right one for them to do that. We’re very pleased, obviously.”

The Senna will join McLaren’s three “levels” of road cars—including the Sports Series (570 and 540 models) and the Super Series (720S)—at the top spot in the maker’s Ultimate Series, at present the exclusive realm of the P1 hybrid and the track-only P1 GTR. Yet while the Senna will be completely street-worthy, make no mistake: its true home will be the race circuit. Indeed, McLaren calls the Senna “the ultimate road-legal track car.” Ayrton would’ve wanted nothing less.

Behind the driver’s seat lies a lion of a powerplant. A more extreme variant of the mill in the 720S, the Senna will use a twin-turbo 4.0-liter V-8 (with a flat-plane crank and a dry sump) kicking out 789 horsepower and 590 lb-ft of torque—making it the most powerful internal-combustion engine McLaren has ever built. Refinements include a new air intake and inlet manifold (fed by a roof-mounted “snorkel”), specially designed camshafts, a reworked engine-management system, and dual high-flow fuel pumps. McLaren says a single pump was unable to produce the required fuel delivery; instead, one pump does most of the work while the second pump kicks-in as needed. Mated to the engine is the same seven-speed dual-clutch paddle-shift transmission found in the 720S. In Sport mode, an F1-bred Ignition Cut system momentarily cuts the spark during gearshifts, quickening gear changes and, McLaren says, producing a stirring “crack” from the exhausts.

Making the most of the engine’s massive output are a body and structure designed for extreme strength and low weight (indeed, the Senna will be the lightest McLaren road car since the pioneering F1). Almost everything is carbon fiber, the latest Monocage III structure said to be McLaren’s most rigid ever. Once construction of McLaren’s new Carbon Composites Technology Center in Sheffield, England, is completed, all carbon-fiber components will be built in-house. Every piece has been fastidiously engineered to keep weight to an absolute minimum. Each door structure, for instance, weighs just 22 pounds (the middle of each door will feature a unique transparent panel, said to enhance the sensation of speed as the road whistles by you just inches away). The front fenders weigh less than 1.5 pounds each. The towering rear wing checks in at less than 11 pounds. McLaren even fussed over the Senna’s nuts and bolts, reducing their weight by 33 percent. All told, the Senna boasts a dry weight of just 2,641 pounds.

In person, the Senna is a striking piece—a feast of wings and scoops and rakish edges so aggressive the car looks like it’s about to bite your hand at any moment. Yet for all of its visual drama, the Senna is quite intentionally more “beast” than “beauty.” “It really is about every element for a reason,” says Dan Parry-Williams, director of engineering design. “Function taking precedence over aesthetics, at least more than we’ve done before.” Which is to say, think “purposeful race car,” not “beautiful sports car.” The Senna’s lines and scoops and wings are made for aerodynamics and ultimate performance above all else.

At the front, a huge carbon-fiber splitter—5.9 inches longer than the P1’s—slices into oncoming air to maximize downforce and cornering power. Just behind it, on either side, lie active aero blades that move in unison with the active rear wing to help maintain aerodynamic balance. Above the aero blades sit headlights incorporating 21 LEDs each. Digitally controlled, the LEDs can vary their intensity according to steering angle, helping to illuminate corner apexes without the need for a “steerable” motor-driven system. Toward the back, the powertrain is cooled by the largest intakes ever incorporated into a road-going McLaren. An artfully shaped front clamshell helps create a high-pressure flow of clean air past the A-pillars and directly into the intakes, while a rear diffuser helps suck the car to the ground at speed. And then there’s that massive rear wing. Constantly adjusting its angle to vary downforce as needed and, under braking, shorten stopping distances, the wing can support more than 100 times its own weight. In concert with the sculptured bodywork, it helps deliver nearly 1,800 pounds of total downforce—40 percent more than the P1.

The suspension is an evolution of the P1’s, using the same fundamental geometry but enhanced by smart software refined on the 720S. McLaren’s new hydraulic RaceActive Chassis Control II system includes four driver-selectable modes: Comfort, Sport, Track, and Race. In Race mode, the suspension stiffens significantly while the nose lowers by 1.5 inches—reducing underbody airflow and enhancing the effectiveness of the front splitter. “We’re looking for a car that’s agile and stable,” says Parry-Williams. “And that’s the great thing about active aero—you can have both. The Senna delivers more agility than any car we’ve done thus far, but at higher speeds, and under high-speed braking, the stability is just extraordinary.” Carbon-ceramic brakes are standard (it takes seven months to make each huge disc) and, in concert with the active-aero rear wing, help deliver the shortest stopping distances of any McLaren road car ever. Cornering prowess and steering feel are enhanced by Pirelli P-Zero Trofeo R tires developed specifically for the Senna.

Inside, the Senna is a minimalist space entirely focused on the mission of speed. The steering wheel is a simple, Alcantara-trimmed three-spoke design devoid of buttons or switches. Major controls—such as the engine-start button and even the electric door releases—are grouped in a pod in the overhead roof panel. The transmission controls move fore and aft along with the driver’s seat, while the seat shells weigh just 7.2 pounds each and are covered with seven Alcantara (or, at the buyer’s choosing, leather) pads; ducts around the pads allow air to flow, the better to cool the backsides of Nomex-clad occupants attacking a racetrack. Extremely thin roof pillars allow an exceptional view to the outside—and they’re strong enough to negate the need for a separate roll cage.

The cabin may be minimalist, but it’s not bare-bones. Air conditioning and a premium seven-speaker Bowers & Wilkins audio system are optional (designed especially for the Senna, the B&W system weighs just 16.1 pounds). Gorgeous carbon fiber trims almost every visible surface. Other options include McLaren Track Telemetry (which can capture and analyze lap sessions), a camera system to complement it, parking sensors, and a rear-view camera. Behind the seats lies storage space for two race helmets, Nomex suits, and driving shoes. If you’re really feeling racy, you can even order a “push to drink” system so you won’t dry up during extended track sessions. And while McLaren has configured a few “ready-made” color/trim combinations, in truth the company is prepared to deliver almost any color or trim accessory the buyer wishes.

So, yes, the Senna can be outfitted with enough amenities to rival almost any other premium sports car. But at its core this remains very much a track-centric, performance-focused machine. After all, McLaren claims a 0 to 60 mph time of just 2.7 seconds, a top speed of 211 miles per hour, and the most mind-blowing handling performance of any McLaren road car ever built (and having recently driven the 720S, that’s saying a lot). What’s more, the Senna has been engineered to feel raw.

“Because it’s track-focused, we’ve gone a bit mental on things like NVH,” laughs Parry-Williams. “The amount of noise, the noise quality, the amount of vibration you feel in the seat rail and how that increases as a function of speed … this is something we’ve deliberately done to add engagement.” McLaren even evolved the exhaust sound to deliver more “higher-order” content. “Compared with t from Performance Junk Blogger Feed 4 http://ift.tt/2sg2q4P via IFTTT