Into the Void

Tuning into your pet’s needs – BlogPaws

My cat turned me on to a new blog for pet owners called BlogPaws. There is some mention of a conference for bloggers, writers and pet supply companies. The first emphasis brought to my attention was the SEO aspect of writing a blog.

kittehboi.com is a fun blog, and though we make sure to mention others’ blogs, etc. for google juice, I don’t want it to end up looking like a Peruvian circus, full of multicolored flashing and dancing adverts.

The first requirement for SEO is to have content that brings readers back. I’m trying to wrap my brain around it, to come up with an idea that goes further than “funny pictures of cats.”

I have a personal interest in evolutionary psychology and neuropsychology, so my personal focus is on animals as intelligent, rational beings. Cats and dogs have the IQ of young children, but much more impulse control.

“C’mon, admit it – we all do it. Some of us talk to them as if they can actually understand us (I’m one of those).”

Did you catch that? The writer said “as if they can actually understand us.” Apparently this person has some doubts.

Dogs (and probably cats) have a Broca’s brain or Wernicke’s area, meaning they are capable of understanding speech. In practice cats have a vocabulary of around 20-30 words while dogs may be able to understand 100 or more. Animal behaviorists will tell you it’s “training.” 40 years ago human psychologists were behaviorists too, and explained all human behavior as learned responses to stimuli. How different *are* training and learning?

Positive deception is when you change the parameters so that you don’t have to lie.

Throwing the ball easy to a little kid so that he succeeds and develops a good attitude toward the game.
Giving every kid a trophy so they don’t get discouraged.
Putting everyone in the school on the Honor Roll so that they all feel good about themselves.

Unfortunately, this instills the kids with total lack of concern for quality.

I often sit out in my car at lunchtime and read. The book I’m reading here is (still) Clarissa Pinkola Estés “Women Who Run With the Wolves.” Dr. Estés covers many psychological topics from the anthropological or mythological perspective. If she isn’t a Jungian, she’s missing a great opportunity.

At home I’m reading “Spritual Emergency” edited by Stanislav Grof and Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” I would rather be home, but not because the books are any better. I ran out of an asthma med because my GP got strange about refilling drugs from a Canadian pharmacy. I did so much albuterol last night that I am still shaking.

I am so devoid of dopamine that my concern over my breathing is little more than an intellectual exercise. Y’all know the feeling?

The quote is about creativity, spirit, the river beneath the river. Many topics in the book refer to cycles or to seasons. I wonder as I sit in the sunshine whether I take psych meds to suppress the seasons of my soul.

In archetypical lore there is the idea that if one prepares a special psychic place, then the being, the creative force, the soul source, will hear of it, sense its way to it, and inhabit that place. Whether this force is summoned by the biblical “go forth and prepare a place for the soul” or, as in the film Field of Dreams, in which a farmer hears a voice urging him to build a baseball diamond for the spirits of players past, “If you build it, they will come,” preparing a fitting place induces the great creative force to advance.
Once that great underground river finds its estuaries and branches in our psyches, our creative lives fill and empty, rise and fall in seasons just like a wild river. These cycles cause things to be made, fed, fall back, and die away, all in their right time, and over and over again.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés in “Women Who Run With the Wolves.”

“Vocatus atque non vocatus… deus aderit
Called or not called , GOD will be present.”
– Inscription on Gravestone of Professor Dr. Carl G. Jung, Kusnacht, Switzerland
Quoted from Heaven’s Register

Have you read any Jung? Jung was a medical doctor whose father was a philospher and pastor. Jung believed that God is not “out there” but is inside us all. God is our subconscious mind! You feel deep down what is right, now don’t you?

Jung pointed out that God evolved morally over the course of biblical history. That’s right, God got better and better. He had to, to keep up with his children’s moral evolution.

Being the firstborn is a curse for a lot of reasons, and it didn’t start with that whole “Dad forgot to paint the lintels” thing.

It can be deduced from the concept of a morally evolving God that Jesus Christ was the manifestation of this evolution. the “God made flesh.” God hoped that a physical manifestation would convince the Pharisees, the NT version of the Religious Right, to evolve too. It didn’t work, though. The Pharisees, like any hierarchical structure heavenly or temporal, were notoriously inflexible. Anything the Pharisees disagreed with was a sin, Evil, abomination. As a child Jesus was almost stoned for breaking one of the old rules.

If God is within us, then the fight between good and evil is going on inside us too. In Jung’s words, “from the psychological point of view demons are nothing other than intruders from the unconscious, spontaneous irruptions of unconscious complexes into the continuity of the conscious process.”

Here’s a simplification derived from Alan Watts‘ Tribute to Carl Jung. Satan isn’t in me, it can’t be, because I am Good. The Evil and the hate must be over there in you! (That’s the non-self-aware speaking, the one with Blind Faith and no reason.)

Look in your heart. Both good and evil are right there inside your own subconscious, making you act out their presence. Like a projector you are shining your own ugly thoughts onto the blank screens of the A-theists. This is the psychology of evil.

And until you discover your self-contradictions, you will always hate anyone who disagrees with you.

As for me, I’m not afraid of the guru. I’m afraid of the people who threaten me with eternal torture in his name.

Powerful Sleep – Health & Energy Blog >> How to Overcome Procrastination with 4 S

As a lifelong procrastinator, I have to say Kacpar nailed it down pretty well. I think that where most of us fall short is this: when I make a commitment to myself, I have to treat it as seriously as if I’d made a commitment to someone else.

Powerful Sleep is great. If the only thing I got out of it was the concept of avoiding delta sleep during daytime naps, it would have been worth every penny.

This sexy Italian graced the Table of Contents of the June issue of a popular alternative health magazine. It appears to be the shadow of a naked woman, complete with nipples.
This photo looks like something right out of a Wilson Bryan Key book.You may remember his fun books, The Clam Plate Orgy, which explains why so many folks who can’t stand fried clams buy the clam plate at HoJo’s.
Mr. Keys books are about subliminal messages in advertising. I’ve probably stated before that American psychology is largely directed toward predicting and manipulating the behavior of large numbers of people. Thus one of the earliest Behaviorists, John B. Watson, found a lucrative position in advertising after he was drummed out of academia.

Key’s examples are pretty funny, and a lot of so-called experts state outright that he was insane. Well, what is insanity but being uncomfortably aware of unacknowledged details? But in most cases the experts give no reason other than that we are too intelligent to be fooled by what often amount to optical illusions. Still, it’s rather disconcerting to find out that your favorite products may be your favorites not because they are superior products, but simply because the packaging appeals to your aesthetic sense. If you can find a used copy of one of his books, I highly recommend it, if only for the dirty pictures.

Click the Sexy Italian to see her in context. Trace down the lighting from the object that is supposed to be casting the shadow and it will become obvious that somebody in the magazine’s advertising department has quite a sense of humor.

Technorati: subliminal+advertising Wilson+Bryan+Key Clam+Plate+Orgy subliminal+messages behaviorists psychology

This little excerpt has a couple of very important concepts.

First, it gives some insight into why some folks somatize their illnesses – because they don’t have a word that helps to define the experience so it falls back into the physical realm.

Second, it shows that individual emotions can be lumped together under less specific umbrella words. This makes a good argument for improving your vocabulary in preventing episodes triggered by external events.

“Anthropologists report enormous differences in the ways that different cultures categorize emotions. Some languages, in fact, do not even have a word for emotion.Other languages differ in the number of words they have to name emotions. While English has over 2,000 words to describe emotional categories, there are only 750 such descriptive words in Taiwanese Chinese. One tribal language has only seven words that could be translated into categories of emotion.
The words used to name or describe an emotion can influence what emotion is experienced. For example, Tahitians do not have a word directly equivalent to sadness. Instead, they treat sadness as something like a physical illness. This difference has an impact on how the emotion is experienced by Tahitians. For example, the sadness we feel over the departure of a close friend would be experienced by a Tahitian as exhaustion. Some cultures lack words for anxiety or depression or guilt. Samoans have one word encompassing love, sympathy, pity, and liking – which are very different emotions in our own culture.”
“Psychology – An Introduction” Ninth Edition By: Charles G. Morris, University of Michigan Prentice Hall, 1996