Ancient Philosophy | Ascension Lifestyle

19 Aug 2023
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What Socrates Can Teach Us About AI

If Socrates was the wisest person in Ancient Greece, then large language models must be the most foolish systems in the modern world.

In his Apology, Plato tells the story of how Socrates’s friend Chaerephon goes to visit the oracle at Delphi. Chaerephon asks the oracle whether there is anyone wiser than Socrates. The priestess responds that there isn’t: Socrates is the wisest of them all.

At first, Socrates seems puzzled. How could he be the wisest, when there were so many other people who were well known for their knowledge and wisdom, and yet Socrates claims that he lacks both?

He makes it his mission to solve the mystery. He goes around interrogating a series of politicians, poets, and artisans (as philosophers do). And what does he find? Socrates’ investigation reveals that those who claim to have knowledge either do not really know what they think they know, or else know far less than they proclaim to know.

Socrates is the wisest, then, because he is aware of the limits of his own knowledge. He doesn’t think he knows more than he does, and he doesn’t claim to know more than he does.

How does that compare with large language models like ChatGPT4?

In contrast to Socrates, large language models don’t know what they don’t know. These systems are not built to be truth-tracking. They are not based on empirical evidence or logic. They make statistical guesses that are very often wrong.

Large language models don’t inform users that they are making statistical guesses. They present incorrect guesses with the same confidence as they present facts. Whatever you ask, they will come up with a convincing response, and it’s never “I don’t know,” even though it should be. If you ask ChatGPT about current events, it will remind you that it only has access to information up to September 2021 and it can’t browse the internet. For almost any other kind of question, it will venture a response that will often mix facts with confabulations.

The philosopher Harry Frankfurt famously argued that bullshit is speech that is typically persuasive but is detached from a concern with the truth. Large language models are the ultimate bullshitters because they are designed to be plausible (and therefore convincing) with no regard for the truth. Bullshit doesn’t need to be false. Sometimes bullshitters describe things as they are, but if they are not aiming for the truth, what they say is still bullshit.

And bullshit is dangerous, warned Frankfurt. Bullshit is a greater threat to the truth than lies. The person who lies thinks she knows what the truth is, and is therefore concerned with the truth. She can be challenged and held accountable; her agenda can be inferred. The truth-teller and the liar play on opposite sides of the same game, as Frankfurt puts it. The bullshitter pays no attention to the game. Truth doesn’t even get confronted; it gets ignored; it becomes irrelevant.

Bullshit is more dangerous the more persuasive it is, and large language models are persuasive by design on two counts. First, they have analysed enormous amounts of text, which allows them to make a statistical guess as to what is a likely appropriate response to the prompt given. In other words, it mimics the patterns that it has picked up in the texts it has gone through. Second, these systems are refined through a process of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). The reward model has been trained directly from human feedback. Humans taught it what kinds of responses they prefer. Through numerous iterations, the system learns how to satisfy human beings’ preferences, thereby becoming more and more persuasive.

As the proliferation of fake news has taught us, human beings don’t always prefer truth. Falsity is often much more attractive than bland truths. We like good, exciting stories much more than we like truth. Large language models are analogous to a nightmare student, professor, or journalist; those who, instead of acknowledging the limits of their knowledge, try to wing it by bullshitting you.

Plato’s Apology suggests that we should build AI to be more like Socrates and less like bullshitters. We shouldn’t expect tech companies to design ethically out of their own good will. Silicon Valley is well known for its bullshitting abilities, and companies can even feel compelled to bullshit to stay competitive in that environment. That companies working in a corporate bullshitting environment create bullshitting products should hardly be surprising. One of the things that the past two decades have taught us is that tech needs as much regulation as any other industry, and no industry can regulate itself. We regulate food, drugs, telecommunications, finance, transport; why wouldn’t tech be next?

Plato leaves us with a final warning. One of the lessons of his work is to beware the flaws of democracy. Athenian democracy killed Socrates. It condemned its most committed citizen, its most valuable teacher, while it allowed sophists—the bullshitters of that time—to thrive. Our democracies seem likewise vulnerable to bullshitters. In the recent past, we have made them prime ministers and presidents. And now we are fueling the power of large language models, considering using them in all walks of life—even in contexts like journalism, politics, and medicine, in which truth is vital to the health of our institutions. Is that wise?

Original article here

26 Jul 2023
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The Chords of the Universe

My interest in the relations between music and mathematics started at an early age. My grandfather played his violin for me when I was about five years old, and I still remember it clearly. Later he explained to me various topics in his physics book, from which he himself had studied when he was young. In the chapter on sound there was a musical staff with the note A, and next to it the number 440, the frequency of that note. That image must have engraved itself on my mind – my first glimpse into the role that numbers play in music. While my grandfather’s violin is no more with us, his tuning fork did survive; although rusted, it still faithfully vibrates at 440 cycles per second. I recently gave it to my percussionist grandson. I hope he will one day pass it on to his grandchildren.

But it is not enough just to study music: one must play it. I started my musical journey playing a recorder. There are numerous Baroque-era works for this simple instrument, but for an appreciation of classical music (‘classical’ here meaning the era of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, roughly 1750 to 1830), a recorder just won’t do, so I took up the clarinet. This instrument was Mozart’s favourite wind instrument, and he wrote for it – or rather for his friend, the clarinetist Anton Stadler – some of his most sublime music. The clarinet has the unusual feature that when you open the thumb hole on the back of the instrument, the sound goes up not by an octave, as with most woodwinds, but by a twelfth – an octave and a fifth. This greatly intrigued me and made me dwell into the acoustics of wind instruments. I was fascinated – and still am – by the fact that a column of air can vibrate and produce a musical sound just like a violin string, even though the vibrations are totally invisible: you can hear them, but you cannot see them.

Music and mathematics have always been intimately intertwined. Anyone who has ever played a musical instrument is aware of the presence of mathematics on every page of the score – from the time signature that sets a piece’s rhythm, to the metronome number that determines the speed at which the piece should be played; and, of course, the very act of playing music requires us to count 1, 2, 3… and arrange these numbers into groups, called bars or measures. So it comes as no surprise that mathematics has had a significant influence on music. Much less known is that the influence extends both ways.

The Greek philosopher Pythagoras, active during the 6th century BCE, might have been the first to uncover a quantitative relation between music and mathematics. Experimenting with taut strings, he found that shortening the effective length of a string to one-half its original length raises the pitch of its sound by an agreeable interval, an octave. Other ratios of string lengths produce smaller intervals: 2:3 corresponds to the musical interval of a fifth (so called because it is the fifth note up the scale from the base note); 3:4 corresponded to a fourth; and so on. Pythagoras also discovered that multiplying two ratios is equivalent to adding their intervals: (2:3) x (3:4) = 1:2, so a fifth plus a fourth equals an octave. In doing so, he unknowingly came up with the first logarithmic law in history.

The octave, the fifth and the fourth produced pleasing combinations of tones, or consonants, whereas more complicated ratios, such as 9:8 or 15:16, led to dissonances. This revelation made a deep impression on the Pythagoreans, prompting their belief that everything in the Universe – from the laws of musical harmony to the motion of the Sun, Moon and the five planets – was governed by simple ratios of whole numbers. Number rules the Universe was the Pythagorean motto. It would dominate scientific thought for the next two millennia.

In Greek tradition, music ranked equal in status to arithmetic, geometry and spherics (astronomy), which together comprised the quadrivium, the core curriculum of four disciplines that a learned person was expected to master. We should note, however, that the word ‘arithmetic’ had a different meaning to the Pythagoreans than it has today: it meant number theory, the study of the properties of integers, rather than the practical skills needed to compute with numbers. Likewise, Pythagoreans regarded the music component of the quadrivium as referring to music theory – the study of harmony – rather than the practice of playing music. This was typical of the aloof attitude of the Pythagoreans to all things practical. Theirs was a perfect universe, governed by notions of beauty, symmetry and harmony, but removed from mundane considerations. It might have been one reason why they kept all their discussions secret, fearing that they would be ridiculed by their fellow citizens, the vast majority of whom had to toil daily to eke out a living.

Though no Pythagorean writings survive – if they left any at all (everything we know about them comes from much later writers) – the Pythagorean legacy lasted well over 2,000 years. Number rules the Universe became a rallying motto to generations of scientists and philosophers, who sought to explain the mysteries of the cosmos on the basis of musical ratios or simple, elegant geometric figures. The planets, for example, had to move around the Earth in perfect circular orbits; it was inconceivable to the Greeks that any shape other than the perfectly symmetric circle could rule. It was all part of their grand view of a Universe ruled by beauty and harmony – their musica universalis, or music of the spheres.

Among the last Pythagoreans was the eminent German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), considered one of the fathers of modern astronomy. At once a devout mystic and an ardent believer in Copernicus’s heliocentric system, Kepler spent more than half his life trying to derive the laws of planetary motion from those of musical harmony. He believed that each planet, in its motion around the Sun, plays a melody that our ears are unable to hear, being below the range of audible frequencies (not to mention that it was produced in the vacuum of space, where sound cannot propagate). He even assigned each planet a celestial tune and wrote it down on the musical staff – resurrecting the celebrated musica universalis. It was only after decades of following this blind path that Kepler finally abandoned the Greek circular orbits and replaced them with ellipses.

Every periodic function can be written as an infinite sum of pure sine waves

Half a century after Kepler, Isaac Newton formulated his universal law of gravitation, thereby providing a rational, mathematical explanation for the planetary orbits, and adding the parabola and hyperbola to the possible orbits of the celestial bodies. But he too was obsessed with musical ratios, devising a ‘palindromic scale’ in which the intervals were the same whether you went up or down: 9:8, 16:15, 10:9, 9:8, 10:9, 16:15, 9:8. He compared it to the seven rainbow colours of the spectrum.

The newly invented differential and integral calculus, developed independently by Newton and G W Leibniz in the decade 1666-1676, made it finally possible to put the relations between numerical ratios and musical harmony on a firm mathematical basis. One of the outstanding problems that the calculus was able to tackle was to find the exact shape of a vibrating string and the nature of the sound it produces. Was it the sum of many – perhaps infinitely many – sine waves or pure tones, each with its own frequency and amplitude? Or was it a combination of waves propagating back and forth along the string’s length? In what became known as the ‘Great String Debate’, four of Europe’s foremost mathematicians – Daniel Bernoulli, Leonhard Euler, Jean le Rond D’Alembert and Joseph Louis Lagrange – argued passionately over this issue, and laid the foundation of post-calculus analysis along the way.

But the definitive solution to the string problem had to wait another half-century, when the eminent French mathematical physicist Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768-1830) showed that every periodic function, subject to certain restrictions, can be written as an infinite sum of pure sine waves, whose frequencies are integral multiples of the fundamental, lowest frequency of the function. These individual sine waves are known as overtones or harmonics; they are the building blocks of all sound, and they give each sound its characteristic tone colour, or timbre – the quality that distinguished the sound of a violin from that of a clarinet, even when they play the same note.

As my musical interests expanded, I gradually ventured beyond the Baroque-Classical-Romantic period (roughly 1600 to 1900), and turned to modern music. In the 1960s there was still much talk about Arnold Schoenberg and his atonal or serial music. He devised it in the early 1900s, convinced that it should replace a sacred cornerstone of classical music: the principle of tonality. Tonality required that a piece of music should centre around a given key, called the tonic, such as C major or G minor. Granted, as the piece developed, it could stray from its designated key to related or even remote keys, but ultimately it would return to its home key, the tonic. The key thus served as a musical frame of reference, in which every note had a specific relation to the tonic; for example, in the key of C major, the note G (a fifth above C) was the ‘dominant’ note, while the note F below C was the ‘subdominant’.

But in the second half of the 19th century, composers gradually began to deviate from a strict adherence to the principle of tonality, making it difficult to sense where the music stood in relation to the tonic. Schoenberg, believing that tonality had run its course, was determined to supplant it with the series, or tone row. In a series, each of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale of semitones appears exactly once; a note could be repeated only after the series had been completed. This gave a composer a staggering number of combinations to choose from: 1 x 2 x 3 x … x 12 = 479,001,600, to be exact (not counting shifts by octaves, which Schoenberg allowed). In serial music, complete democracy ruled: no single note held any preferred status over the others. Every note was related only to its immediate predecessor in the series; gone were the roles that different notes had played in relation to the tonic. At its heart it was a mathematical system, and Schoenberg was determined to impose it on music.

As a mathematician, I see a striking similarity between Schoenberg’s serial music and Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, as though a parallel dismantling of the canonical structures of music and physics were happening simultaneously. In 1905, Einstein gave the ether its coup de grâce: there is no ether, no single universal frame of reference at absolute rest; rather, every observer has his or her own reference system, related only to its infinitesimally close neighbouring system in spacetime. One cannot fail to note the similarity to Schoenberg’s atonal music, in which each note is related only to its immediate predecessor in the series. You might call it relativistic music.

Schoenberg worked on the design of a musical typewriter; Einstein invented a refrigerator

Schoenberg and Einstein were almost exact contemporaries, born within five years of each other to middle-class Jewish families. Their mothers, both named Pauline, were steeped in classical music, so the two youngsters were raised in music-loving homes. They started their careers as low-level employees – Schoenberg as a bank clerk in Vienna, Einstein as a clerk at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. At a young age, both turned their backs on traditional Judaism, only to return to it late in life, having been deeply affected by the rise of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust that followed. Both men were essentially self-taught: Schoenberg never got a formal musical education, while Einstein (though he graduated from the University of Zurich) got his education by studying the great physics treatises of the 19th century on his own.

Following the Nazi rise to power in 1933, both men emigrated to the United States. Schoenberg immediately got rid of the German umlaut of his original name, Schönberg, while Einstein had to get used to the American pronunciation of his name (pronounced ‘Einshtein’ in German). Both passionately pursued their hobbies – Schoenberg as a painter and avid tennis player, Einstein playing his iconic violin and enjoying an outing on his little sailboat. They also liked to tinker with gadgets: Schoenberg worked on the design of a musical typewriter, while Einstein, with his fellow physicist Leo Szilard, invented and patented a refrigerator.

Following the Nazi dismissal of all Jewish professors from German universities, both men worked tirelessly to help displaced academics find jobs in their countries of refuge. Neither Schoenberg nor Einstein ever set foot on European soil again (although Schoenberg’s remains were buried in his native Vienna), and they died within the same time-span that separated them at birth, in their 76th year.

The revolutionary ideas of Einstein and Schoenberg came against the backdrop of groundbreaking changes in other fields, all happening as the 19th century turned into the 20th. Gustav Mahler premiered his First Symphony, Titan (1889), conducted by the composer himself. Sigmund Freud published his first major work, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Pablo Picasso entered his ‘Blue Period’ (1901-1904), and Max Planck introduced into physics a new concept that would soon revolutionise all of science: the quantum of energy. If all that weren’t enough, David Hilbert, Germany’s foremost mathematician at the turn of the century, challenged the Second International Congress of Mathematicians, held in Paris in 1900, with a list of 23 unsolved problems whose solutions he regarded as of utmost importance to the future growth of mathematics – as indeed they would prove to be.

Whether these developments had any effect on Einstein’s and Schoenberg’s work is difficult to say, but it is revealing that several of the actors in this new world were actively involved with music: Einstein’s violin immediately comes to mind; Planck was an accomplished pianist; and the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Werner Heisenberg seriously considered pursuing a career in music before turning to quantum mechanics.

In his quest to unify music and mathematics under a single universal umbrella, perhaps Pythagoras was right after all.

Original article here

17 Jul 2023
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How do you stay optimistic in spite of it all? 6 hopeful souls share their secrets

Do the woes of the world get you down? Are daily headlines capsizing your ship?

Well, we’ve got just the pick-me-up for you. Last week, the Skoll World Forum was bustling with innovators and entrepreneurs engaged in the work of “transformational social change” — that is, making the world a better place. We drew lessons in optimism from six individuals in attendance, who shared what gives them cause to be hopeful — why they find themselves smiling in spite of everything. The following answers have been edited for length and clarity.

Don’t let the narrative change you. You must change the narrative

I don’t believe that all of these problems are happening to us. I believe they’re happening for us. Lonnie Holley is this wonderful artist who uses discarded material to create artwork. He says we shouldn’t think of it as trash and garbage. Rather, it’s something to work with … something to make something new out of. It’s this idea of narrative change. I like to think of it as “aesthetic force” because you can change people’s minds and opinions through this work.

And isn’t that a glorious thing? The possibility to shift and to pivot and to participate and to move … which becomes ignited when times get hard.

You look at the civil rights movement. All these horrible things were happening, and it just propelled them forward. It made them want to move. Same thing with this racial reckoning. Something challenging and horrible had to happen to activate people and make them want to embrace dignity in a new way.

So when we look at how much we’ve survived and the shoulders that we stand on, what’s not to be joyous about? — Ava Duvernay

Sleep, pray, love in safety

I love my family. I was brought up in a very close family. Of course we fight, but we also laugh together. We share everything — all the joys and the pains. And I know the pain I am feeling, my family will feel the same thing. We confide in each other and find comfort in that. When I want to be happy, my family is always there for me.

We are also a very religious family. We consider church our second home. All people want in church is peace. When we pray all together, I feel that I am reconnecting with God and that God can hear my prayer and everything that I’m concerned about because I open my heart completely.

Even when my whole family is overwhelmed, it is the priest and the church community who come to our rescue and comfort us as we pour our hearts out and cry. These are people who share my problems and I know they are on my side. I’m able to talk freely and not withhold anything.

So I can fall asleep in the presence of my family and my church — with these people who I love. I know that I am safe. — Mahali Hlasa

Tune into the genius of rural communities

I’ve been working in rural areas for the last ten years. And in the women, peasants and farmers I’ve met there, I’ve found another kind of genius. They help me understand that the future is possible.

I’ve seen how people in rural communities show a special sort of resilience and a lasting connection with nature and the universe that go back millennia.

In the north, we tend to be more similar in our approach. But amongst rural communities in the Global South, we see a beautiful diversity of opinions, understandings, ideas and knowledge that we need to recover to imagine a better future. These individuals can be tremendous leaders and mentors to all of us as we get back to our roots as humans in full connection with our planet. — Rodrigo Paris Rojas

Finding power in prayer

As for where I find optimism, I’ll tell you — I start my day with prayer and I end my day with prayer. That’s the biggest thing in my life. I’m a Roman Catholic and for me, that’s where it all starts. Prayer is very personal. My prayer is between me and my God. But of course, I also pray with other people. In Kenya, a lot of our meetings actually start with a prayer.

We’re a deeply spiritual people, whether we’re Christian, Muslim, or Hindu. I think that is what continues to hold us and keep us together and keep the humanity part of us alive. — Michael Onyango

Walk, chant, trust in goodness

When I see systems change so slowly, when I talk to girls and I find that not so much has changed in all these decades, of course I’m overwhelmed. Sometimes it really seems futile.

But I have this practice in the morning that I started doing during COVID when I was stuck at home and frightened. So after my walk in the morning, I come back, sit to face the sun, do a sun salutation, and I say some Vedic chants.

These invoke the goodness of the universe to protect and bless everything that exists — the sun, the moon, the fire, the wind, the Earth, living beings, the body, the soul and the self.

And along with that, I call out loud a set of affirmations. One is that I deeply love and accept myself.

Another one is that I trust the forces of goodness. That they’re taking care of the universe. And I believe it. It restores my faith and restores a feeling of wellbeing.

I focus on and have faith in the goodness around. And I think eventually, it will prevail. — Urvashi Sahni

Dance and draw strength from kids and nature

I find optimism in rural communities, in villages and slums. That’s because despite the difficult environment around them, they’re able to dance. At different times of year, they come together and celebrate. They bring so many smiles, so much joy. When I see that, I say, “I have more money than them, more education, more access, but they’re way happier than me.” So I find optimism in those ways of celebrating life and building community.

I’ve also found optimism among kids — Black, white, poor, rich — they play and they can enjoy life. They connect. It’s only later that they learn about differences and start to behave differently. But when I see how they interact as children, it’s all about playfulness. Even during war times or in refugee camps, I see kids finding ways to create joy amongst themselves.

And finally, in nature — how everything’s about collaboration. So when I see the patterns of nature and the way that nature treats me since I was a kid, it’s all about optimism. The negativity comes from humanity and the way that we behave to create scarcity — how we’re afraid of and draw boundaries between one another.

But from certain communities, from children, from our elders and from nature, I feel optimistic that we can fix things. That we can create abundance by sharing. — Edgard Gouveia Jr.

Original article here

18 Jun 2023
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Can We Time Travel? A Theoretical Physicist Provides Some Answers

Time travel makes regular appearances in popular culture, with innumerable time travel storylines in movies, television and literature. But it is a surprisingly old idea: one can argue that the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex, written by Sophocles over 2,500 years ago, is the first time travel story.

But is time travel in fact possible? Given the popularity of the concept, this is a legitimate question. As a theoretical physicist, I find that there are several possible answers to this question, not all of which are contradictory.

The simplest answer is that time travel cannot be possible because if it was, we would already be doing it. One can argue that it is forbidden by the laws of physics, like the second law of thermodynamics or relativity. There are also technical challenges: it might be possible but would involve vast amounts of energy.

There is also the matter of time-travel paradoxes; we can — hypothetically — resolve these if free will is an illusion, if many worlds exist or if the past can only be witnessed but not experienced. Perhaps time travel is impossible simply because time must flow in a linear manner and we have no control over it, or perhaps time is an illusion and time travel is irrelevant.

Laws of Physics

Since Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity — which describes the nature of time, space and gravity — is our most profound theory of time, we would like to think that time travel is forbidden by relativity. Unfortunately, one of his colleagues from the Institute for Advanced Study, Kurt Gödel, invented a universe in which time travel was not just possible, but the past and future were inextricably tangled.

We can actually design time machines, but most of these (in principle) successful proposals require negative energy, or negative mass, which does not seem to exist in our universe. If you drop a tennis ball of negative mass, it will fall upwards. This argument is rather unsatisfactory, since it explains why we cannot time travel in practice only by involving another idea — that of negative energy or mass — that we do not really understand.

Mathematical physicist Frank Tipler conceptualized a time machine that does not involve negative mass, but requires more energy than exists in the universe.

Time travel also violates the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy or randomness must always increase. Time can only move in one direction — in other words, you cannot unscramble an egg. More specifically, by travelling into the past we are going from now (a high entropy state) into the past, which must have lower entropy.

This argument originated with the English cosmologist Arthur Eddington, and is at best incomplete. Perhaps it stops you travelling into the past, but it says nothing about time travel into the future. In practice, it is just as hard for me to travel to next Thursday as it is to travel to last Thursday.

Resolving Paradoxes

There is no doubt that if we could time travel freely, we run into the paradoxes. The best known is the “grandfather paradox”: one could hypothetically use a time machine to travel to the past and murder their grandfather before their father’s conception, thereby eliminating the possibility of their own birth. Logically, you cannot both exist and not exist.

Kurt Vonnegut’s anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five, published in 1969, describes how to evade the grandfather paradox. If free will simply does not exist, it is not possible to kill one’s grandfather in the past, since he was not killed in the past. The novel’s protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, can only travel to other points on his world line (the timeline he exists in), but not to any other point in space-time, so he could not even contemplate killing his grandfather.

The universe in Slaughterhouse-Five is consistent with everything we know. The second law of thermodynamics works perfectly well within it and there is no conflict with relativity. But it is inconsistent with some things we believe in, like free will — you can observe the past, like watching a movie, but you cannot interfere with the actions of people in it.

Could we allow for actual modifications of the past, so that we could go back and murder our grandfather — or Hitler? There are several multiverse theories that suppose that there are many timelines for different universes. This is also an old idea: in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Ebeneezer Scrooge experiences two alternative timelines, one of which leads to a shameful death and the other to happiness.

Time Is a River

Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote that:

Time is like a river made up of the events which happen, and a violent stream; for as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place, and this will be carried away too.

We can imagine that time does flow past every point in the universe, like a river around a rock. But it is difficult to make the idea precise. A flow is a rate of change — the flow of a river is the amount of water that passes a specific length in a given time. Hence if time is a flow, it is at the rate of one second per second, which is not a very useful insight.

Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking suggested that a “chronology protection conjecture” must exist, an as-yet-unknown physical principle that forbids time travel. Hawking’s concept originates from the idea that we cannot know what goes on inside a black hole, because we cannot get information out of it. But this argument is redundant: we cannot time travel because we cannot time travel!

Researchers are investigating a more fundamental theory, where time and space “emerge” from something else. This is referred to as quantum gravity, but unfortunately it does not exist yet.

So is time travel possible? Probably not, but we don’t know for sure!

Original article here

07 Jun 2023
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The length of Earth’s days has been mysteriously increasing, and scientists don’t know why

Atomic clocks, combined with precise astronomical measurements, have revealed that the length of a day is suddenly getting longer, and scientists don’t know why.

This has critical impacts not just on our timekeeping, but also things like GPS and other technologies that govern our modern life.

Over the past few decades, Earth’s rotation around its axis – which determines how long a day is – has been speeding up. This trend has been making our days shorter; in fact, in June 2022 we set a record for the shortest day over the past half a century or so.

But despite this record, since 2020 that steady speedup has curiously switched to a slowdown – days are getting longer again, and the reason is so far a mystery.

While the clocks in our phones indicate there are exactly 24 hours in a day, the actual time it takes for Earth to complete a single rotation varies ever so slightly. These changes occur over periods of millions of years to almost instantly – even earthquakes and storm events can play a role.

It turns out a day is very rarely exactly the magic number of 86,400 seconds.

The ever-changing planet

Over millions of years, Earth’s rotation has been slowing down due to friction effects associated with the tides driven by the Moon. That process adds about 2.3 milliseconds to the length of each day every century. A few billion years ago an Earth day was only about 19 hours.

For the past 20,000 years, another process has been working in the opposite direction, speeding up Earth’s rotation. When the last ice age ended, melting polar ice sheets reduced surface pressure, and Earth’s mantle started steadily moving toward the poles.

Just as a ballet dancer spins faster as they bring their arms toward their body – the axis around which they spin – so our planet’s spin rate increases when this mass of mantle moves closer to Earth’s axis. And this process shortens each day by about 0.6 milliseconds each century.

Over decades and longer, the connection between Earth’s interior and surface comes into play too. Major earthquakes can change the length of day, although normally by small amounts. For example, the Great Tōhoku Earthquake of 2011 in Japan, with a magnitude of 8.9, is believed to have sped up Earth’s rotation by a relatively tiny 1.8 microseconds.

Apart from these large-scale changes, over shorter periods weather and climate also have important impacts on Earth’s rotation, causing variations in both directions.

The fortnightly and monthly tidal cycles move mass around the planet, causing changes in the length of day by up to a millisecond in either direction. We can see tidal variations in length-of-day records over periods as long as 18.6 years. The movement of our atmosphere has a particularly strong effect, and ocean currents also play a role. Seasonal snow cover and rainfall, or groundwater extraction, alter things further.

Why is Earth suddenly slowing down?

Since the 1960s, when operators of radio telescopes around the planet started to devise techniques to simultaneously observe cosmic objects like quasars, we have had very precise estimates of Earth’s rate of rotation.

A comparison between these estimates and an atomic clock has revealed a seemingly ever-shortening length of day over the past few years.

But there’s a surprising reveal once we take away the rotation speed fluctuations we know happen due to the tides and seasonal effects. Despite Earth reaching its shortest day on June 29 2022, the long-term trajectory seems to have shifted from shortening to lengthening since 2020. This change is unprecedented over the past 50 years.

The reason for this change is not clear. It could be due to changes in weather systems, with back-to-back La Niña events, although these have occurred before. It could be increased melting of the ice sheets, although those have not deviated hugely from their steady rate of melt in recent years. Could it be related to the huge volcano explosion in Tonga injecting huge amounts of water into the atmosphere? Probably not, given that occurred in January 2022.

Scientists have speculated this recent, mysterious change in the planet’s rotational speed is related to a phenomenon called the “Chandler wobble” – a small deviation in Earth’s rotation axis with a period of about 430 days. Observations from radio telescopes also show that the wobble has diminished in recent years; the two may be linked.

One final possibility, which we think is plausible, is that nothing specific has changed inside or around Earth. It could just be long-term tidal effects working in parallel with other periodic processes to produce a temporary change in Earth’s rotation rate.

Do we need a ‘negative leap second’?

Precisely understanding Earth’s rotation rate is crucial for a host of applications – navigation systems such as GPS wouldn’t work without it. Also, every few years timekeepers insert leap seconds into our official timescales to make sure they don’t drift out of sync with our planet.

If Earth were to shift to even longer days, we may need to incorporate a “negative leap second” – this would be unprecedented, and may break the internet.

The need for negative leap seconds is regarded as unlikely right now. For now, we can welcome the news that – at least for a while – we all have a few extra milliseconds each day.

Original article here

29 May 2023
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The big idea: why colour is in the eye of the beholder

In February 2015, a Scottish woman uploaded a photograph of a dress to the internet. Within 48 hours the blurry snapshot had gone viral, provoking spirited debate around the world. The disagreement centred on the dress’s colour: some people were convinced it was blue and black while others were adamant it was white and gold.

Everyone, it seemed, was incredulous. People couldn’t understand how, faced with exactly the same photograph of exactly the same dress, they could reach such different and firmly held conclusions about its appearance. The confusion was grounded in a fundamental misunderstanding about colour – one that, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, shows little sign of disappearing.

For a long time, people believed that colours were objective, physical properties of objects or of the light that bounced off them. Even today, science teachers regale their students with stories about Isaac Newton and his prism experiment, telling them how different wavelengths of light produce the rainbow of hues around us.

But this theory isn’t really true. Different wavelengths of light do exist independently of us but they only become colours inside our bodies. Colour is ultimately a neurological process whereby photons are detected by light-sensitive cells in our eyes, transformed into electrical signals and sent to our brain, where, in a series of complex calculations, our visual cortex converts them into “colour”.

Most experts now agree that colour, as commonly understood, doesn’t inhabit the physical world at all but exists in the eyes or minds of its beholders. They argue that if a tree fell in a forest and no one was there to see it, its leaves would be colourless – and so would everything else. To put it another way: there is no such thing as colour; there are only the people who perceive it.

This is why no two people will ever see exactly the same colours. Every person’s visual system is unique and so, therefore, are their perceptions. About 8% of men are colour-blind and see fewer colours than everyone else; a small number of lucky women might, thanks to a genetic duplication on the X chromosome, be able to distinguish many more than the rest of us.

Animals inhabit very different chromatic worlds too. Most mammals are red-green colour-blind; bulls might be famous for their hatred of red capes, but the colour itself is invisible to them – they are actually enraged by the fabric’s movements. By contrast, most reptiles, amphibians, insects and birds perceive more colours than us. Bees see ultraviolet light, discerning elaborate patterns in flowers that we cannot perceive, while snakes see infrared radiation, detecting the warm bodies of prey from a distance.

People generally name only the colours they consider socially or culturally important

“Colour,” Umberto Eco once said, “is not an easy matter.” It is indeed elusive and illusive. Pretty much everything we take to be self-evident about it really isn’t self-evident at all. Scientists have shown that the sky isn’t blue, the sun isn’t yellow, snow isn’t white, black isn’t dark and darkness isn’t black.

One cause of the problem – or perhaps its symptom – is language. In English we divide colour space into 11 basic terms – black, white, red, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, grey, orange and pink – but other languages do things differently. Many don’t have words for pink, brown and yellow, and some use one word for both green and blue. The Tiv people in west Africa use only three basic colour terms (black, white, red), and at least one Indigenous community has no specific words for any colours, only “light” and “dark”.

The vocabulary of these languages isn’t dictated by the prismatic spectrum but, once again, by what is happening inside their speakers’ heads. People generally name only the colours they consider socially or culturally important. The Aztecs, who were enthusiastic farmers, used more than a dozen words for green; the Mursi cattleherders of Ethiopia have 11 colour terms for cows, and none for anything else.

These differences might even influence the colours they see. Debates about linguistic relativity – the extent to which our words shape our thoughts and perceptions – have been rumbling on for decades, and while many scholars have overstated the case for it, some have found persuasive evidence that if you don’t, say, have a word for blue, you will probably find it harder to distinguish.

The meanings of colour are no less socially constructed, which is why a single colour can mean completely different things in different places and at different times. In the west white is the colour of light, life and purity, but in parts of Asia it is the colour of death. In America red is conservative and blue progressive, while in Europe it’s the other way around. Many people today think of blue as masculine and pink as feminine, but only a hundred years ago baby boys were dressed in pink and girls in blue.

When all of this is taken together – the subjective nature of visual perception, the complicating influence of language, the role that social life and cultural traditions play in filtering our understandings of colour – it becomes really rather difficult to reach a conclusion different from that of the 18th-century philosopher David Hume: that, in the end, colour is “merely a phantasm of the senses”.

The ancient Egyptian term for “colour” was iwn – a word that also meant “skin”, “nature”, “character” and “being”, and was represented in part by a hieroglyph of human hair. To the Egyptians, colours were like people – full of life, energy, power and personality. We now understand just how completely the two are entangled. That’s because every hue we see around us is actually manufactured within us – in the same grey matter that forms language, stores memories, stokes emotions, shapes thoughts and gives rise to consciousness. Colour is, if you’ll pardon the pun, a pigment of our imaginations.

Original article here

01 May 2023
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Who Invented the Measurement of Time?

In modern times, clocks underpin everything people do, from work to school to sleep. Timekeeping is also the invisible structure that makes modern infrastructure work. It forms the foundation of the high-speed computers that conduct financial trading and even the GPS system that pinpoints locations on Earth’s surface with unprecedented accuracy.

But humans have likely lived by some version of the clock for a very long time. The ancient Egyptians invented the first water clocks and sundials more than 3,500 years ago. Before that, people likely tracked time with devices that did not survive in the archaeological record—such as an upright stick in the dirt that acted as a primitive sundial—or no device at all, says Rita Gautschy, an archeoastronomer at the University of Basel in Switzerland.

“It’s really difficult to get a grip on when people started with timekeeping,” Gautschy says. Simply by observing the location of the sunrise and the sunset each day and by watching how high the sun reaches in the sky, a person can construct a primitive calendar. These early human efforts at understanding the flow of time left no trace at all, she says.

The oldest sundial on record came from Egypt and was made around 1500 B.C.E. It consisted of a simple upright stick and a roughly semicircular base divided into 12 pie-shaped sections. The shadow of the stick gave an approximate hour of the day. Other early sundials measured time by the length of a stick’s shadow as the sun moved across the sky rather than by the movement of the shadow across the base, Gautschy says.

“It’s a first step, and if you accomplish this step, you can do fine-tuning and also adapt to different months,” she says. Sundials must account for both time of year and latitude to be truly accurate.

During the night, ancient people could track time by the apparent movement of the stars from east to west, Gautschy says. And for measuring discrete units of time, they used water clocks. These were vessels that either had holes for water to flow out of at a constant rate or were filled from another vessel and had markings on the inside to indicate increments of time. The oldest surviving water clocks were found in Egypt and Babylon, and the earliest of these date to around 1500 B.C.E. In China historical records claim that water clocks were invented by the Yellow Emperor, or Huangdi, a half-historical, half-mythical figure said to have lived between 2717 and 2599 B.C.E., says Zheng-Hui Hwang, a mechanical engineer at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan, who has written about the history of ancient Chinese timekeeping devices. The earliest Chinese water clocks were probably outflow devices and were known as louke. The unit ke divided the day into 100 equal segments from midnight to midnight. Over time, Hwang says, inventors made these clocks more sophisticated by equipping them with multiple water supply vessels or otherwise adjusting them to ensure the rate of water flow remained stable.

Water would eventually lead to some extremely sophisticated timekeeping: by the early 700s C.E., Tang Dynasty monks developed a mechanical clock powered by a water wheel, Hwang says. In 1194 Sung Dynasty official Su Song built on this design to develop a 40-foot-tall (12-meter-tall) mechanical clock powered by a water wheel that worked much like the mechanical clocks that would be invented in Europe some 200 years later.

The ancient Chinese timekeeping system also divided each 24-hour day into two-hour segments. This system was also seen in ancient Japan and Korea, according to a 2004 paper in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan.

In modern times, an hour is always the same length, but ancient peoples around the world operated with a more complex system, says David Rooney, a historian of technology, former curator of timekeeping at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, and author of About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks (W. W. Norton, 2021). Some ancient timekeeping systems divided the light portion of the day into 12 segments and the night into 12 segments, but because days and nights vary in length throughout the year except at the equator, these “seasonal hours” were different lengths from day to night and across the year.

“If your religion demands prayer time being linked to things like sunrise or sunset, or if you’re working in the fields, as most people did then, patterns of daylight and darkness matter more than this idea of a universal hour,” Rooney says.

Seasonal hours coexisted with universal hours until the 15th century in Europe and up until the 19th century in Japan, Rooney says. “We used to live with a much more complex—and rich and diverse—temporal culture,” he adds.

Religion was a major driver of the standardization of time across cultures, both across the year and day to day, Gautschy says. In ancient Mesopotamia, Anatolia (today approximately Iraq and Turkey) and Greece, people developed lunar calendars to track rituals and feast days, she says, whereas people in Egypt focused more on the solar calendar and also had a calendar based on the star Sirius. People of Islamic cultures, Rooney says, used water clocks to track prayer and fasting, whereas Christians developed the mechanical clock in 14th-century Europe as a way to schedule prayer.

The bottom line, Rooney says, is that humans have been temporal creatures for far longer than the industrial age—although not always happily. After the Romans installed their first public sundial in 263 B.C.E., he says, the Roman playwright Plautus objected to the new fad of timekeeping via a character in one of his plays: “The gods damn that man who first discovered the hours, and—yes—who first set up a sundial here, who’s smashed the day into bits for poor me! You know, when I was a boy, my stomach was the only sundial, by far the best and truest compared to all of these…. But now what there is, isn’t eaten unless the sun says so. In fact, town’s so stuffed with sundials that most people crawl along, shriveled up with hunger.”

It’s a strikingly modern thought for being 2,200 years old, Rooney says. “That could be written in the 21st century and spoken in any office,” he says, “that we’re under the tyranny of the clock.”

Original article here

27 Mar 2023
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How the ancient philosophers imagined the end of the world

What are the main threats to the continued survival of humanity? What catastrophes lie ahead? These may seem like uniquely modern questions posed by contemporary thinkers in the growing field of existential risk. Yet, millennia ago, ancient Greek and Roman philosophers were already formulating and debating such questions. While these thinkers had radically different ways of looking at the world and one’s place in it, they all agreed that some form of apocalyptic catastrophe awaited humans in the future.

How can we explain this interest? One of the main reasons is that ancient philosophers realised that the end of the world is ‘good to think with’. End-of-the-world narratives allow for a form of time travel. They offer a vision of the future while permitting us to safely witness the coming catastrophe.

The stories we tell about the end of the world reveal much about our current worldview and how the past and present have shaped our current trajectory. Unlike the Biblical tradition, which sees the end of the world as a day of divine wrath and judgment in which the elect are saved and the rest are damned, ancient Greek and Roman philosophers saw the end of the world as a natural process that was part of the regular functioning of the cosmos. They largely posited that human development is limited, and that humanity and world catastrophe are inextricably linked. Nature has imposed fixed and inexorable limits to human growth and development. Such messages are increasingly urgent today.

In the ancient world, as today, there were many different scenarios for how the world might end, and these were often in critical dialogue with each other as well as with earlier stories about destructions by fire and water. Already in the 6th century BCE, Anaximander may have posited that all of Earth’s water will eventually dry up, leaving a parched and barren world without life. By contrast, his successor, Xenophanes, argued that the world will actually be destroyed by water. (He even offered evidence that there had already been a great flood, noting that seashells have been found on land far from water.)

It is in Plato’s philosophy, from the mid-4th century BCE, that we find some of the first sustained attempts to envision multiple end-of-the-world scenarios: fires, floods, earthquakes and disease. He writes in the Timaeus: ‘there have been and there will be a great many destructions of humans’ (all translations are my own). Rather than understanding history as headed toward a definitive, teleological end,

Plato sees human development as continually determined by various forms of world catastrophe, and these accounts make for some of his most intriguing philosophical insights. In his dialogues Timaeus and Critias, Plato used this theory to tell the story, likely of his own invention, of the destruction of Atlantis. He also adopts something of an early eco-critical stance when describing the changes that have occurred to the natural environment around Athens as a result of these periodic disasters. In his final dialogue, the Laws, Plato imagines how these repeated terrestrial catastrophes shape the development of political life.

Plato’s student Aristotle is a problematic case. Like his teacher, Aristotle posits that human development is cyclical. Humans continually discover, develop, lose and then rediscover the same ideas and technologies. In his extant works, however, Aristotle does not explain what causes these cycles. Later writers offer evidence that, in his now-lost dialogues, Aristotle followed Plato’s theory of periodic world catastrophes, but perhaps he later rejected it.

It is often said that ancient Greek thought conceived of time as cyclical. Plato and Aristotle’s views of the repeated development of society would seem to bear out that point, at least from a human perspective: the world is never destroyed, and it persists indefinitely. But cyclicality is not always the best way to define ancient philosophical thought. Democritus and the Epicureans, for instance, theorised the end of the world in the fullest sense. While they both argued that there are multiple worlds built up of atoms, and that all worlds are headed for a definitive end, they posited different methods of destruction. Democritus, a younger contemporary of Socrates, is reported to have claimed that worlds are destroyed when one world crashes into another.

This scenario anticipates the contemporary awareness of the dangers of asteroid strikes and other ‘near-Earth objects’. Epicurus, who set up his philosophical garden in Athens around 307 BCE, argued that each world dies when it eventually dissipates and scatters into the void. Again, to put things in terms of modern risks, perhaps this idea has a resonance with the loss of the protective atmosphere. The Stoics, who were the Epicureans’ great philosophical rivals during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, endorsed a strong view of cyclical time and eternal return. They argued for the periodic destruction and rebirth of the world by fire, which they called the ekpyrosis. (Some Stoics, however, rejected this theory.)

The ancient Greek and Roman philosophical tradition lies beneath many contemporary visions of the future. Popular modern scenarios that see humanity attempting to rebuild after world catastrophe, such as Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006) or the television series The Walking Dead (2010-22), are more indebted to Plato’s theories than to Biblical apocalypses. Plato surmises that there are alBibleways survivors left after a global catastrophe. In the Laws, Plato gives an account of how the survivors of a cataclysm would slowly rebuild society: in contrast to modern post-apocalyptic visions of scarcity and conflict, he posits that ‘civil strife and war’ would vanish and that people would ‘act kindly and be well disposed to each other’ (678e). Similarly, it might appear that the contemporary visions of a secular catastrophe based on chance rather than God’s plan represent a thoroughly modern idea, as some scholars have recently argued. Yet even this scenario has an important, if overlooked, precedent in ancient philosophy. The Epicureans were not atheists, but they did believe that the gods played no part in ordering the world. Creation and destruction of worlds was left to the random swerving of atoms through the void. In this system, even the end of the world could be a sudden, chance event. Writing in the 50s BCE, the Roman Epicurean Lucretius drives this point home in his poem On the Nature of the Universe (De rerum natura):

Perhaps the event itself will grant credibility to my words, and soon you will see everything forcefully shaken by earthquakes. I hope Fortune the helmsman will keep this far away from us, and reason, rather than the event, will persuade you that everything can be crushed and fall with a terrifying crash.

Yet ancient philosophical speculation on the end of the world was not only concerned with such big-picture cosmological questions. Thinking about the end of the world could also be put to more practical day-to-day purposes. This is particularly clear with Roman Stoic and Epicurean philosophers, who closely linked physics (the study of the nature of the Universe) with ethics and how to live a good life. Lucretius frequently uses the end of the world to help alleviate the fear of death. The Stoic philosopher Seneca (c4 BCE-65 CE) discusses how imagining the end of the world can offer consolation after the death of a loved one or alleviate feelings of loneliness.

One of the main goals of Stoic philosophy was to be able to meet with understanding, equanimity and resilience each event and challenge, including the end of the world. Even the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180 CE) wrote about the end of the world as part of his daily practice of philosophy: ‘Everything in existence will quickly be changed: either it will be turned into vapour, if the nature of the Universe is one, or it will be scattered.’ Although Marcus Aurelius is typically seen as a Stoic philosopher, when it comes to envisioning the end of the world, he is not dogmatic. He entertains the Stoic and Epicurean scenarios. Either the world will be burned and vaporised in the ekpyrosis, or its atoms will be scattered into the void. What is on display here is not only the emperor’s acceptance of other philosophical systems but also the fact that thinking and writing about the end of the world is part of his ‘spiritual exercises’, his everyday engagement with philosophy that helps him live the good life. Modern psychological evidence seems to back up this ancient insight. Envisioning the end of the world may be good for you by aiding in developing psychological resilience.

Today, the ever-growing and multiplying threats of world catastrophe often seem overwhelming and incomprehensible. As such they may inspire fear, a feeling of helplessness and ‘doomerism’. The ancient philosophical tradition on the end of the world does not offer a panacea for our current anxieties about the future. These philosophers did not have to reckon with the anthropogenic existential risks we currently face, and no strand of Greek and Roman philosophy sought to prevent the end of the world. Nevertheless, this tradition may offer a way to reposition ourselves psychologically with respect to future catastrophes and existential risks. We could follow their advice and accept the end of the world with equanimity. Or we could build on their insights and move on to the next tasks of shaping, if not a catastrophe-free future, at least a more catastrophe-resilient one.

Original article here

06 Mar 2023
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Mayan Equinox Forecast

A Mayan Report for the year beginning on 2 IK and 8 MANIK.

Equinox cycle from 3-21-2023 to 3-20-2024

A forecast blending the energies of two sacred Mayan Calendars.

Flowing in the Power Of Pure Spirit

Mayan Kiche’ “Cholq’ij Traditional Calendar.

The Calendar of the Heart. (Spirit Reality)

Mayan year of 2 IK (Wind)

The numbers in the Mayan calendar are the power that drives the cycles of time. With the power of 2 (KIEB), we will begin to see forward movement where we will find ways to balance the polarities. We will begin to feel much needed relief as we move away from the 1 (Jun) year where we were in a semi stalled situation and it was hard to make anything manifest. But also the year before that was a 13 year period where it triggered a lot of powerful endings and clearings of old programs. The last age will begin to move into the rear view mirror as we enter the second half of the very first Katun in this new cycle (20 years). There is so much possibility in front of us now. We may not know what is coming for us yet, but it is going to be fresh, new and full of surprises. We will find empowering ways to navigate and heal the huge polarities that the last few years of major endings had created. The old polarized state of mind always accelerates with the falling of an old age.

The day sign of IK (Wind), is hard to contain in a boundary. It is the wind and in an instant the winds can kick up and change everything. We are learning to become comfortable with uncertainty and this year will test that wisdom. It will be a year that if we hang on to anything that is out of balance, the wind will simply beat us up. There are always those who hang on and want to keep things the same and feed their illusion of safety. But then there are the courageous warriors who are not afraid of the unknown and the huge potential out in front of us. Being flexible and going with the flow will make life less stressful and less painful especially when we stay open to all the surprising new possibilities. It will be a good year for ones who can tune into the subtleness of spirit. Also those who are creative by nature, you could initiate loads of new life altering ideas. Both the number 2 and IK are about spirit, and not the material world. If your spiritual life has felt stalled the last few years this could change now as well. We are being birthed into a new cycle and anything is possible.

Birthing a New Community of Creative Cooperation

Mayan Astrology Yucatec Calendar.

The Calendar of the Mind (Physical Reality)

Mayan year of 8 Manik (Hand)

The number 8 will bring the much-needed essence of harmonization, healing and community spirit. This will assist humanity in finding a new balance in all areas of life and bring spirit into manifestation. It is a gracious bridge between what was and what will be, and a step beyond old polarities. It is about restructuring and the new world will begin to take form. It is a time of being experimental and learning what will manifest now and what will not. It is also a number where we become more open to other perspectives and belief systems where in the past cycle it was very polarizing. We will be able to breathe easier in this energy and all the changes and budding new creations will be easier to adjust to.

The day sign of MANIK is known for its ability to dive deep into community work. But it also serves as a healing bridge between opposite desires. We may want freedom but we are also not too fond of responsibility. We could be torn between two opposites a lot this year. It is a good time to listen to the heart, as the heart does not lie, but the overactive mind will. The lesson for this equinox cycle is to find a bridge between the need for freedom and being interdependent in a community project. This cycle could bring the birth of innovative projects. The choice to move forward in any new endeavors will feel overwhelming this year as we will be in new territory with no roadmap, but once the choice is made it will only empower us.

Manik has the ability to be traditional and also embrace more eccentric focuses which can trigger unconventional live choices. It can be very creative. It can inspire the inner artist, musician, poet or writer, but we need to be flexible to see the new creations and not become distracted by outer or external tools. The extreme distraction with outer spiritual tools, (examples… crystals, books, workshops, etc) is a past echo of some of the issues we had in Atlantis, which caused the unbalanced energy that was the beginning of the fall of that age. We will need to move out of the head and the material world and come back into the heart over and over again.

This calendar cycle finishes up with 40 days+ of extremely powerful days. We will travel through the second 20 Core Day Ascension Portal, flanked on either side with 10 galactic portal days. Hang on to your hiking boots! This cycle will end with a bang!

(The astronomical equinox is March 20th at 2:24 pm MST. But the Maya Elders in Guatemala always celebrate in various sacred sites in Mexico and Guatemala, etc, on the 21st. Let us send these Elders our heart energy and give thanks for them remembering and maintaining this cosmic wisdom.)

via Aluna Joy

05 Jan 2023
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Six Ways To Create Inner Peace And Confidence In The New Year

We all want to feel inner peace. We look for it throughout our entire lives, as being at peace allows us to dream and to actually follow those dreams. When we are at peace with ourselves, we are more understanding and loving towards others, we are able to embody the concept of being One, and therefore we create deeper and more meaningful connections with family, friends and people in general.

Confidence is very important, too. When we have confidence in our inner self, we are more prepared to take risks to advance, and we feel focused and motivated to face challenges. Confidence is believing in our own abilities and skills to do what we want and need to do in order to achieve a good quality of life, not only in the physical world, but also in the spiritual realms of existence.

I want to share a few ways of creating inner peace and confidence in this new year. Just by committing to one of these suggestions, you will see transformation happening in your soul and body.

Change habits

We are all attached to habits that in the long run do not allow us to advance in our inner self journey. In this sense, observing one self in order to identify a few of those habits is advisable. A good way to do this is to sit down in silence and review your daily habits one by one, being very honest with yourself.

Once you have identified those habits you want to change or completely delete from your life, start with the process of substitution. Go little by little and be realistic, which means doing what you are prepare to do, without overwhelming yourself, because implementing new habits should be easy. If you are going to get stressed trying to make a lasting change, not doing it at all is better. Your emotional and mental health come first.

“If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.” ~ Ghandi

Start a daily meditation practice

Meditation has been found to have numerous scientific benefits. For example, it reduces stress, improves concentration, boosts creativity, and increases happiness. Meditation affects our mental health in a positive manner, decreasing anxiety and depression, improving sleep, and enhancing self-awareness

The benefits of meditation touch our physical being as well. Research shows that it helps lower blood pressure, thereby improving cardiovascular health and strengthening our immune system.

There are numerous types of meditation. However, when starting it is better to follow guided meditations, as this kind of meditation allows us to understand what we are really doing and to enter into the practice with ease. And don’t overwhelm yourself! Set an achievable time, like 5 to 10 minutes per day, to start. Once you have learned to meditate for this length of time comfortably, you can increase it.

“The energy of the mind is the essence of life.” ~ Aristotle

Cultivate a positive attitude

A positive attitude has been linked with increased happiness, health and success in all areas, including the spiritual realm. Make an effort to be more positive this year. This does not mean you should avoid negative thoughts and feelings. Instead, acknowledge them and aim to elevate yourself by seeing them in another light. Find solutions from there.

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.” ~ Marcus Aurelius

Practice living in the now

Making a conscious effort to focus on the present involves attention. We have to control our attention, observe where we are placing it and bring it to the now. It is normal to think about the past or the future, but remember that the past is gone and the future never really arrives, we always live it in the present. Sense, live and enjoy every moment of your day. Try this approach and see what happens.

“The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Practice gratitude

Gratitude is a powerful feeling, because, for me, it is love in action. Make it a habit to focus on the things you are grateful for, big and small. You could start a gratitude journal, which I am doing this year. I have created my own journal and my aim is to write in it every day. You can also take a few moments each day to reflect on the things you are grateful for.

Science has proven that feeling and expressing gratitude impacts our emotional and mental health in a positive way. In fact, the HeartMath Institute has discovered that, “Gratitude releases a powerful, self-rewarding feel-good neurotransmitter in the brain.” Furthermore, they have measured the heart rhythms of people when they feel gratitude and appreciation, and the results show a coherent rhythm: in other words a coherent heart.

“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.” ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Get organized

While this advice might not seem to be “spiritual”, nourishing our inner self requires discipline, will and order. Organisation in certain areas of our lives brings us joy and a sense of freedom.

This same idea should be applied to our spiritual practices, meaning that it is important to create a routine and ways of tackling such practices. For example, every morning I start my day with a short meditation and connection to the Source exercise, then I say a few decrees and I end with a short positive visualisation of the activities of the day.

Our external life needs organisation, too. One of the things I do the first month of the year is reorganise my closet, and any place at home in need of order. By doing so, I am creating space not only in my physical surroundings, but in my mind and in my heart. I encourage you to get rid of anything that bothers you and is only collecting dust. Organisation is liberation!

“Organization is what makes the impossible possible, the easy easy, and the difficult manageable.” ~ Zig Ziglar

About the Author:

Veronica Sanchez De Darivas is Chilean-Australian, now living in the UK and a proud mother of teenage twins. A spiritual awakening teacher, bestselling author, pineal gland (third eye) activator and Certified Instructor for the Cyclopea Method, Veronica is currently the only instructor in the world teaching the Cyclopea Method in English.