After failing high school - disillusioned with the meaning of life - David drifted until he was introduced to the Metaphysics of Quality. He now spends his time using it to make things better!
Russell Brand : The Mystic
Russell Brand does yoga and meditation. In the above video he talks about how both of these things help him find a connection which Drugs and Sex cannot. It’s rare to have a celebrity with such considerable self confessed experience in drugs and sex, speak with such honesty in what way they don’t work.
“I’ve really tried drugs. I’ve really tried sex. I really tried all these things and they do not work.”
Russell Brand
Robert Redford On a Sailboat > “[In this film] there’s nothing but the elements. Nothing but the weather, a man, a boat – that’s it.” > **Robert Redford**
In a new J.C. Chandor film Robert Redford ‘plays an unnamed solo sailor woken by a collision with a drifting shipping container that rips a hole in his 11-metre yacht. Taking on water, and with his navigation equipment and radio broken, he is stranded in the middle of the Indian Ocean, with a violent storm approaching.’
In Lila, Robert Redford made a cameo appearance as the person to romance the sailing narrator before he sold the rights to his previous book – Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Interestingly, in the book the narrator mentioned Redford’s value of the Victorians:
“Those Victorians seemed to light Redford up too. He’d made a lot of films about that era. Something about them probably interested him as it does many other people. The Victorians represented the last really static social pattern we’ve had. And maybe someone who feels his life is too chaotic, too fluid, might look back at them enviously. Something about their rigid convictions about what was right and what was wrong might appeal to anyone brought up in laid-back Southern California of the forties and fifties. Redford seemed to be a rather Victorian person himself: restrained, well mannered, gracious. Maybe that’s why he lives here in New York. He likes the Victorian graciousness that still exists here in places.”
And in the press conference Redford also talked about the losing of values:
“As I can look back now.. I can see America in kind of a series of sections where change happened as America moved from one place to the next. As it moved from one place to the next, certain things got lost, got dropped. Our belief system began to have holes punched in it.. But I was raised at a time when a belief system was what you lived on.”
“Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era, received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.
Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor’s cup full, and then kept on pouring. The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. “It is overfull. No more will go in!”
Like this cup, Nan-in said, you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”
Three Myths of Behavior Change.
Jeni Cross who is a sociology professor at Colorado State University, talks about the three Myths of Behavior change. In these notes below I’ve ignored the SOM jargon and instead written about how the research applies to values. I could find five main takeaways from the 3 Myths.
MYTH 1. Information is enough to change behavior.
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If we speak to what folks value by making things tangible, personalized and interactive this is far more likely to change their mind than simply supplying them facts.
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Also, because folks are also loss averse, that is, they don’t want to lose value they already have, they are far more likely to change their behavior if it means they won’t lose value.
MYTH 2. Changing attitudes changes behavior.
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You can actually set qualitative behavioral expectations to change behavior and attitudes.
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You can also change behavior by speaking to what folks already value.
MYTH 3. Folks know their values.
- Social norms influence behavior far more than folks give credit for. If you speak to folks value of social norms, then you’re far more likely to change their behavior than they give credit for.
Intellectual Discussion and Dialectic.
Finding Agreement, Quality and Beauty in the World.
When two people discuss a concept intellectually – naturally there will be disagreement. What then?
In the two and a half thousand years since Socrates and the Ancient Greeks what two people aim for has been the truth. Disagreement has immediately implied that what one person thinks is false and therefore wrong, while what the other person thinks is true and therefore right. The way to determine this right and wrong has been to logically argue about what is true and what is false. Each participant in this dialectical discussion – using the rules of logic – determines the truth by watching for things like contradiction and consistency from their interlocutor. If someone is inconsistent, or shows contradiction, then what they are saying is false and thus the person demonstrating the contradiction is right. Quality, Values and Morals in these discussions are unimportant. Truth and logical consistency is the focus, not Quality or Values or Morals.
But of course – this isn’t how things are. Quality, Values and Morals do exist and *are *very important. Values actually create our ideas and opinions. And so if we are to ever reach agreement, we will not find it simply with the aid of logical consistency (although it helps). If we only keep our eyes on logical consistency we will be forever stuck in muddy water at the bottom of a waterfall – not in the clean water at the top. Unless we explain, beautifully, the values, the morals which form the quality of our opinions we won’t get anywhere but be stuck with a bunch of meaningless, valueless, truths.
This is true not just of one or two discussion – but of all discussions – everywhere. Why do people value the things that they do? Why do some people call one thing moral, while another group call something else moral? Of course, in these discussions there will be disagreement. But unless there is an openness to this disagreement, an openness to see something better, an openness to even try the values of another, an openness to be honest with yourself about your own values – then things will stay the same and not get any better.