The History of the Middle Finger

plucking-the-yewA bit of history? with a labio dental fricative.

The History of the Middle Finger:

Well, now……here’s something I never knew before, and now that I know it, I feel compelled to send it on to my more intelligent friends in the hope that they, too, will feel edified.

Before the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the French, anticipating victory over the English, proposed to cut off the middle finger of all captured English soldiers. Without the middle finger it would be impossible to draw the renowned English longbow and therefore they would be incapable of fighting in the future. This famous English longbow was made of the native English Yew tree, and the act of drawing the longbow was known as ‘plucking the yew’ (or ‘pluck yew’).

Much to the bewilderment of the French, the English won a major upset and they began mocking the French by waving their middle fingers at the defeated French, saying, See, we can still pluck yew! Since ‘pluck yew’ is rather difficult to say, the difficult consonant cluster at the beginning has gradually changed to a labiodentalfricative ‘F’, and thus the words often used in conjunction with the one-finger-salute! It is also because of the pheasant feathers on the arrows used with the longbow that the symbolic gesture is known as ‘giving the bird.’

And yew thought yew knew every plucking thing. Didn’t yew!!

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When the guru is wrong…

thats-methed-up-dudeToday I learned a lesson so cruelly cutting, my stomach hurt from it.

Now, being on the other side of it, it has opened my eyes to so many things, I am surprised.

I found out that some of my carefully crafted assumptions based in decades of education might be wrong.

I have been fighting it for more than a week now… and finally, today, I had to face the piper.

The polar pitcher, the equipment I use for energizing water, has changed: the pitcher you get on Amazon today are slightly smaller than what I own and have based my water energizing system on.
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Updated: Soul Correction: Finish What You Start

suck-you-drySoul Correction: Finish What You Start

Update 7/10/2016:

The archetype is the flatterer scam artist. If you are their victim: They will hook you with their compliments, flattery, while suck you dry, take you for your last dime, without ever caring about you, and without ever delivering on what they said they would do.

If you are the person with this soul correction: You find yourself with projects half started, never finished. You find yourself getting enough satisfaction out of buying a self-improvement program, but you don’t actually listen to it or use it.

Your self-image is “insignificant.” Maybe even weak, inconsequential, not important. Or you suffer from delusions of grandeur: you are or should be the best the best looking, the smartest, a hero… except that you are literally unwilling to do the work to make it happen… What’s in the way is that pesky “should already” be that. Or “it should be easy for me, even if it is hard for others”

You instinctively know who is a sucker, and you latch onto them. I must be a sucker: you are attracted to me… Why? How? I am sensitive to your flattery… that is MY weakness, and you know it.

piling up the debts to the UniverseIt’s all a game.

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Read the original article: Updated: Soul Correction: Finish What You Start

When your life is looked at through a different filter, you see something you have never seen

Photographer Removes Phones From Photos To Highlight Our Terrible Addiction

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How addicted are you to your cell phone? The real answer may surprise you. “Removed” is an awesome photo project by American photographer Eric Pickergill that highlights our horrible addiction to smartphones in a whole new way. Pickergill removes phones and other digital devices from his photos and as a result presents an entirely new photo—one that shows how much we are missing out on everyday moments all because of technology.

Pickergill admits he’s not above smartphone addiction; he spends far too much time on his mobile devices too. It wasn’t his own addiction that inspired the project, but instead a family he encountered while out taking notes at a New York café.
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One path to Self you may want to take

the-most-awe-inspiring-youtube-videos-One of the capacities you want to cultivate is the capacity of being in awe. Awestruck, awe-inspired.

Why? Because unless you can be moved on the inside, you are dead and I can’t help you… nobody can.

Unless you can attain to a certain level of awe, you are not going to be able to have a purpose to your life, or love, or rise above the pedestrian existence of the current humanity.

And no, I am not going to turn it on for you, please don’t ask.

This is a project you need to invent for yourself, and try to get in the state of awe. Inspiring stories, inspiring books, inspiring people, inspiring movies.

Awe is being present to the beyond… the beyond of the level where you are, the beyond of the knowable universe… from where all power comes.
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The sad guru… Paramahansa Yogananda

Possession-of-materialYogananda… I have measured his vibration at different times, in different contexts, always having a different number come up. So today I spent some time in his space… to see what’s up.

Paramahansa Yogananda was a sad person. For two reasons, the two sides of the same coin: he had something that he wanted to share, and it wasn’t shareable.

His words are simply his idea what made him the way he was, and the words did not communicate. Did not do for others what they, he thought, did for him.

So, slowly but surely, his words became a lie. Now, he himself wasn’t the way he said people should be: he had sadness, grieving, devastation move into his heart.

And greed… wanting. Wanting it to be different. Wanting that burning go away from his throat and his upper chest.

And then it all fell apart… and what remained is pretense.

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The biggest learning to date… how I used the “how to boil a frog” method to grow myself

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I have been attempting to learn higher level marketing than I have been doing for a few years now. Marketing is hard… and I don’t have a natural aptitude to it. Every time I bought a program I “had … Continue reading

Read more here:: https://yourvibration.com/27113/used-the-how-to-boil-a-frog/

      

How much grit do you have? Take the grid test!

Not at all like me Not much like me Somewhat like me Mostly like me Very much like me
1. New ideas and projects sometimes distract me from previous ones. 5 4 3 2 1

2. Setbacks don’t discourage me. I don’t give up easily.

1 2 3 4 5

3. I often set a goal but later choose to pursue a different one.

5 4 3 2 1

4. I am a hard worker.

1 2 3 4 5

5. I have difficulty maintaining my focus on projects that take more than a few months to complete.

5 4 3 2 1

6. I finish whatever I begin.

1 2 3 4 5

7. My interests change from year to year.

5 4 3 2 1

8. I am diligent. I never give up.

1 2 3 4 5

9. I have been obsessed with a certain idea or project for a short time but later lost interest.

5 4 3 2 1

10. I have overcome setbacks to conquer an important challenge.

1 2 3 4 5

To calculate your total grit score, add up all the points for the boxes you checked and divide by 10. The maximum score on this scale is 5 (extremely gritty), and the lowest possible score is 1 (not at all gritty).

You can use the chart below to see how your scores compare to a large sample of American adults.I

Percentile

Grit Score

10% 2.5
20% 3.0
30% 3.3
40% 3.5
50% 3.8
60% 3.9
70% 4.1
80% 4.3
90% 4.5
95% 4.7
99% 4.9

Keep in mind that your score is a reflection of how you see yourself right now. How gritty you are at this point in your life might be different from how gritty you were when you were younger. And if you take the Grit Scale again later, you might get a different score. As this book will continue to show, there is every reason to believe that grit can change.

Grit has two components: passion and perseverance. If you want to dig a little deeper, you can calculate separate scores for each component: For your passion score, add up your points for the odd-numbered items and divide by 5. For your perseverance score, add up your points for the even-numbered items and divide by 5.

If you scored high on passion, you probably scored high on perseverance, too. And vice versa. Still, I’ll take a guess that your perseverance score is a wee bit higher than your passion score. This isn’t true for all people, but it’s true for most people I’ve studied. For instance, I took the scale while writing this chapter, and I scored 4.6 overall. My perseverance score was 5.0, and my passion score was only 4.2. Strange as it sounds, staying focused on consistent goals over time is more of a struggle for me than working hard and bouncing back from setbacks.

This consistent pattern—perseverance scores more often topping passion scores—is a clue that passion and perseverance aren’t exactly the same thing. In the rest of this chapter, I’ll explain how they differ and show how to understand them as two parts of a whole.

You can read the whole book on my subscribers’ site.

Read the original article: How much grit do you have? Take the grid test!

Become an Expanding human being aka living an interesting life

tumblr_o59w74rBvA1szqwnwo1_500I am reading one of my all time favorite books. Again. I was guided to read it again. As I have been guided to watch everything I watch, read everything I read.

Sometimes the key to the insight is on page 800 of a book, or in episode 60 of a Netflix series.

The tricks are: trust, don’t be in a hurry, don’t expect the “key” to be a direct answer, and once you have what you were needing, acknowledge it.

This book is full of clues for me. Clues for why you are living a life of quiet desperation, why you don’t live an interesting life.

The book is about a little girl who gets an interactive smart book, to teach her life. ((Neal Stephenson: The Diamond Age, in my subscribers only area in pdf, kindle, and epub format.))

She is four years old when she gets the book.

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The chemicals in your food: are they a big threat?

cover

The biggest threat to “them” is the man who stops jumping

There is an issue that I need to address: your trained Chemophobia.

You have been trained to bark up the wrong tree.

You have been trained to have Chemophobia, and it is bigger threat to your health than the chemicals themselves.

Why? For the same reason that you are attracted to film stars’ sex life… You don’t know chemistry, but you understand some words. So you are morbidly curious…

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