Tag Archive for 'hacking'

How I Learned to Love Fermented Cod Liver Oil (and Everything Else as Well…)

jackson published on March 4, 2012 in food, technology and zeitgeist. 8 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Gooood Morning SuperForest!

I often write about the mind and its power over the body. I also often write about how our cultural conditioning determines every aspect of what we call our minds. Our values, our likes and dislikes, our preferences, all are based in where and when we were raised.

This plasticity of the mind is something that I think about a lot, sort of like a toaster thinking about toasters toasting, I guess. How to use this plasticity to my advantage is my main focus.

Case in point: fermented cod liver fish oil.

Melissa was doing some research into tooth decay and found a number of websites that advocated using a combination of fermented cod liver fish oil and butter oil to help teeth stay healthy. Now, why this butter/oil combination works is beyond me, but that it could work is interesting. Basically, if I believe that it could work, then it could work indeed.

The problem is this: the stuff tastes wretched. Fermented cod liver oil tastes exactly like it sounds like it would taste; like fish guts that have been left out to get stinky. Melissa bought a little bottle of it and we decided to eat the recommended quarter teaspoon. Blech. Not wanting to have our teeth fall out, and believing in the curative power of the stuff, I decided to play a little game with my and Melissa’s minds. I would craft and introduce an idea into the both of us that would counter act and redirect the “get nauseated” impulse that arose in me whenever we tasted the fish oil.

One night, before our fish oil, I said to Melissa something to the effect of:

“Hey, you know why I love this fish oil?”

“Why?” Melissa said.

“Because it always reminds me of that time we spent with the Eskimos up in Alaska. Do you remember that?”

Melissa and I have never been to Alaska, nor have we ever hung with Eskimos. Melissa quickly and amusedly pointed that out.

“No, no, you remember! We went to Alaska and we lived with the Eskimos and we had so much fun! We ate seal blubber and cod liver oil and all that raw reindeer meat. Oh man, wasn’t it delicious? Every time I eat this cod liver oil it reminds me of that trip.”

Melissa and I were smiling at each other. The basic idea was this: my feelings toward the taste of cod liver oil were totally conditioned. The taste of cod liver oil is neutral. How I felt about it was everything, and how I felt about it was entirely up to me. Since I had been conditioned to believe that cod liver oil tastes revolting, I decided to create a fake memory that would redirect the nausea into a feeling of nostalgia and satisfaction. I didn’t hate the tastes of cod liver oil, I loved it! It reminded me of a great time I once had with a person I loved.

Now, that this memory I created never happened and that fact was inescapable had nothing to do with the effects it had on my mind. My mind, plastic and flexible and re-writable piece of wonderment that it is, happily accepted the new procedure for what to do when encountering cod liver oil. Instead of not enjoying it, I chose to enjoy it, and as a result I did.

When I eat cod liver oil now, it brings to mind three things: the memory of creating the memory and sharing it with Melissa (happy!), the fake memory of the trip to Alaska and the enjoyment of exciting Eskimo cuisine complete with bizarre made up details that I have filled in myself (happy!), and the idea that my reactions to everything I encounter are entirely up to me, once I recognize that my reactions are open to being set and reset ad nauseum ad infinitum (triple happy!)

Think about the power implicit in this. What could you do with your life if you realized that literally everything you thought or felt could be rewritten, and redirected into whatever experiential alley you chose?

(via)

 

Case study two: Love the Police.

Whenever I am driving, and I see a cop, a part of me freezes. Gets nervous. Perhaps it’s because I’m from Los Angeles originally and the sight of a cop while driving means getting pulled over and getting a ticket. My conditioned reaction to seeing the police was to have my peace upset. Realizing this unhelpful pattern was dominating my behavior I set out to change it.

Starting several months ago, whenever I was driving and saw a cop, I would wave or give them the shaka. Instead of simply ignoring the police while inwardly freezing up a bit, I forced myself to be gregarious.

“Ah ha! A policeman in a squad car! My friendly friend! My helpful friendly officer friend. The police are here to help.” this was the sort of thinking that I forced myself to engage in while smiling and waving at the police. That they never waved back made no difference at all.

For a while, I would be driving, see a cop, freeze up inside, remember my pattern interrupting idea, and force myself to wave. It felt unnatural. It felt phony. It felt forced and stupid. But I kept at it, and yesterday a miracle happened.

I was driving, I saw a policeman in a squad car coming toward me, and I felt a rush of gratitude and happiness. I waved at the passing policeman and continued on my way. The reconditioning had worked!

“Fake it ’til you make it” is a popular phrase in the world of mind study. Feeling sad? Force your face into a grin and watch as the happy parts of your brain fire and soon you feel happy. Force yourself to laugh and eventually you’ll be laughing for real. Force yourself to reconsider and redirect your feelings towards the police from fear to joy and watch as the police begin to trigger joy feelings in you.

I did the same thing with tailgaters! When people tailgate me now, I pretend that they are my friends and their car has broken down and I am towing them. Instead of feeling frustrated when people drive on my tail, now I feel a bit sad when they pass me.

Training, puppies, training. I have treated my own mind like it was a new dog and I am astounded to see that it is quite capable of forgetting old patterns and replacing them with new ones that I like better and serve me more. I can teach my mind new tricks and the end result is that I am happier.

Every single facet of my reality is up to me to control. Every single thing. How nuts is that? Even more nuts is that I am not some sort of special case. We all have this gift. Most of us will not realize it or utilize it because we are never told that it exists, and we are never taught how to utilize it. You have the same power of mind that I myself have. You can take any external stimuli and train your mind to react to it in any way you see fit.

Our culture conditions us to feel and think certain ways about the world, but once we realize that this is so, we can examine and change any pieces of conditioning that we feel no longer serve our peace and happiness.

Got an unhappy past? Change the story to one of your triumph over adversity, with all your former enemies and tormentors recast as zen masters and teachers. Change the story in your mind and observe that your body will respond accordingly. That statement may strike you as offensive and elitist, but that’s your choice isn’t it? My words are neutral. You decide how to feel about them.

The conditioned separated ones will be upset by this information, and the flexible united ones will use this trick to make their entire existence one of joy and peace. Which side would you like to be on?

The search for enlightenment boils down to this: enlightenment is inside you, in the form of a chosen set of responses to the outside world. If Buddha would just smile and enjoy a nice long sit in a thorn bush, then you and I can train ourselves to enjoy the same thing. We can tell ourselves that the thorns that pierce our flesh are actually loving kisses, or the tickling of butterflies. Or we can tell ourselves that we love the feeling of thorns in our flesh, that it reminds us of wonderful, happy things.

We can choose anything and everything to enjoy, especially the things that our culture has told us to feel negatively towards: sickness, death, poor people, rich people, women, men, other ethnicities, other people’s sexual preferences, religion, the military. We can enjoy or loathe these things at our convenience. But to loath them, indeed, to loath anything, without understanding the mechanics behind why you feel that way, is a waste of a good mind. Your mind has better things to do.

We can use any trick we like to remake the world, but it always starts with remaking ourselves.

Love,

Jackson

p.s. Here’s an earlier SF post about how I taught myself to pee on command.

SF Journal – Mar 12, 2009: 2 Bits of Amazacrazy Cyber-news! DDoS Attacks and the Grass-Mud Horse

jackson published on March 12, 2009 in superforest journal, technology and zeitgeist. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , .

picture-51

Good morning SuperForest!

And what a fine morning it is.

There are two pieces of news I read recently that totally blew my mind and reminded me of the power of the internet to both create and destroy.

The first is that the Kremlin recently admitted that it’s anti-fascist youth group the Nashi were responsible for the 2007 cyber attacks that shut down the country of Estonia. The young hacker group brought Estonia’s internet to a complete standstill by launching a DDoS attack (distributed denial-of-service) on the country’s servers.

So basically a government sponsored group of kids used computers to overload another country’s internet, effectively bringing all electronic commerce in that country to a halt. This would be like a World of Warcraft guild electronically taking out Jamaica.

This is astounding news. Jaw-dropping in its implications. What astounding power! Only keystrokes needed to shut down a country.

A DDoS attack basically runs like this: Hackers use zombied computers to try to repeatedly load a web page. Try to load the same web page enough times, from enough computers and the server hosting the web page shuts down. Do this again and again, and with enough computers requesting web pages and enough servers shutting down, and you’ve effectively shut down the whole country. That’s what they did. And the Kremlin is admitting to backing it.

Wild times, these. (Crazier still, it’s only the second biggest cyberattack to date. Here’s numero uno, Titan Rain, launched against the US.)

Without bothering to condemn or condone, let’s jump straight to learning from this. States and countries need better protection against cyberwarfare, that much is certain. What other information can we parse from this? Teenage Russian hackers are highly skilled, but were their attacks fueled by nationalism, teenage unrest, merely boredom? A mix of all three? Something I’ve not mentioned?

If the Nashi can destroy, which it clearly can, what then could it create? And what steps is Estonia taking to ensure that this doesn’t happen again?

We shall wait and see.

picture-62

And number two on the list of cyber-news that will astound… have you heard the news about the “grass-mud horse“?

If not, let us clue you in on a grand joke being played on the censors of China’s internet by clever Chinese citizens.

It seems that the words: “Grass-mud horse” in Chinese are a vile obscenity. But only in spoken Chinese! In Chinese characters, the name is once more benign. Obscenities are not tolerated on China’s internet, but the “grass-mud horse meme” is proliferating like mad anyways… How? And why?…

From the NY Times:

“Government computers scan Chinese cyberspace constantly, hunting for words and phrases that censors have dubbed inflammatory or seditious. When they find one, the offending blog or chat can be blocked within minutes.

Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, who oversees a project that monitors Chinese Web sites, said in an e-mail message that the grass-mud horse “has become an icon of resistance to censorship.”

“The expression and cartoon videos may seem like a juvenile response to an unreasonable rule,” he wrote. “But the fact that the vast online population has joined the chorus, from serious scholars to usually politically apathetic urban white-collar workers, shows how strongly this expression resonates.”

Wang Xiaofeng, a journalist and blogger based in Beijing, said in an interview that the little animal neatly illustrates the futility of censorship. “When people have emotions or feelings they want to express, they need a space or channel,” he said. “It is like a water flow — if you block one direction, it flows to other directions, or overflows. There’s got to be an outlet.”

Here is that outlet taken form:

“An alpaca-like animal — in fact, the videos show alpacas — it lives in a desert whose name resembles yet another foul word. The horses are “courageous, tenacious and overcome the difficult environment,” a YouTube song about them says.

But they face a problem: invading “river crabs” that are devouring their grassland. In spoken Chinese, “river crab” sounds very much like “harmony,” which in China’s cyberspace has become a synonym for censorship. Censored bloggers often say their posts have been “harmonized” — a term directly derived from President Hu Jintao’s regular exhortations for Chinese citizens to create a harmonious society.

In the end, one song says, the horses are victorious: “They defeated the river crabs in order to protect their grassland; river crabs forever disappeared from the Ma Le Ge Bi,” the desert.”

I read recently that the internet treats any form of censorship as a form of damage, it immediately begins routing information around the “damage.” And thus the “emotions as water” analogy is a perfect one. So, if emotions, like information resist all forms of censorship and actively seeks ways to express themselves, are emotions the internet? Or is the internet our emotions?

It’s all so fascinating! One thing’s for sure, little by little China’s citizens are growing ever more aware of the electronic thought oppression they live under and are actively working to subvert it.

Here’s the full story from the Michael Wines @ the Times.

Behold the power of the internet. It can bring down, it can build up, it can tear apart, and it can seal together.
But it is at it’s heart just a reflection of its creators, and it is there to show us what WE are capable of, and how to learn from our own actions.

We at SuperForest are so pleased to be along for the ride!

What a wild world this is where children can stop a country with silicon, and a mythical creature can fight for freedom of thought for billions of people.

I love love love this planet.

-Jackson