Month: June 2012

Symbolist Movement

Creativity, Poems, Psychology

Moréas’ Symbolist Manifesto

as translated by C. Liszt

I am interested in how literature can influence, inspire and effect art, and as such want to concentrate on reading more and painting more! I am going to start with symbolist poetry influences. I came across a website that translates the Symbolist movements manifesto, here

http://www.mutablesound.com/home/?p=2165

and am going to develop research and exploration within this post around the theme of the symbolist movement.Image

INTRODUCTION

French Symbolism was a complex and influential literary movement that flourished during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Although the term Symbolism was first applied by Jean Moréas in 1885, the stylistic, thematic, and philosophic tenets of this poetic movement were established earlier in the works of Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé. In overview, the works of the Symbolists were characterized by a concern with moods and transient sensations rather than lucid statements and descriptions, a desire to apprehend the existence of a transcendental realm of being where one could commune with the innate but inscrutable essences of life, a hermetic subjectivity, and an interest in the morbid or esoteric. Like the Decadents, their contemporaries in late nineteenth-century French literature,

the Symbolist poets rejected conventional religious, social, and moral values, embracing instead a world-negating escapism, the lure of exoticism, and an aggressive individualism. They also reacted strongly against the traditional techniques, rigid forms, and descriptive propensities of their poetic forebears, the Parnassians, and repudiated the then dominant fictional mode of the Naturalists, writers who sought to represent human life in terms of physical and biological forces and rendered their works in uncomplicated, journalistic prose. Instead, the Symbolist poets were primarily concerned with the expression of inward experience, and their approach often resulted in works that were intentionally obscure and highly personal.

Although it can be said to have originated decades earlier, the Symbolist movement emerged formally in the mid-1880s as a reaction to adverse criticism that had been directed at poets associated with the Decadent movement. Responding to critical attacks aimed at the “decadent” style of writers who had drawn their inspiration primarily from the works of Baudelaire, Moréas published an essay in the journal Le XIXe siècle in 1885 defending the search for a new language, one that progressed beyond the previous conventions of French versification to convey a poetic reality independent of rhetoric and surface descriptions. In this essay, Moréas coined the term “symbolism” in its modern sense, believing it a more accurate and less derogatory word than “Decadence” to describe his work and that of his contemporaries. In a continuation of the debate over the validity of the movement, Moréas published “Manifeste littéraire de l’école Symboliste” a year later in Le Figaro, in which he proclaimed Symbolism the dominant school of French poetry. The same year, Moréas joined with Gustave Kahn and Paul Adam to found Le Symboliste, a short-lived periodical devoted to the cause of Symbolist literature. Perhaps the best-known journal of the movement was the Mercure de France, which was co-founded by Remy de Gourmont, one of the most prominent critics to support the Symbolists. Defining the principles of Symbolist art, Gourmont asserted that Symbolism meant “individualism in literature, liberty in art,” and the “abandonment of existing forms.”

Long before the 1886 publication of the Symbolist manifesto by Moréas and the subsequent critical codifications of the movement, however, the aesthetics and ideology of Symbolism were embodied in the poetic works of its principal proponents: Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé. Baudelaire’s verse collection Les Fleurs du mal (1857; The Flowers of Evil) represents a catalogue of qualities that would appear in the writings of the later Symbolist writers: individualism to the point of misanthropy, perverse eroticism, fascination with the exotic, extreme cynicism, occult reverence for the power of language, and nostalgia for a spiritual homeland that exists beyond the visible world. In particular, Baudelaire’s poem “Correspondences,” first published in Les Fleurs du mal, articulates two important principles of Symbolist poetry: first, that esoteric parallels exist between material and spiritual worlds; second, that human sense perceptions, such as those of sight or hearing, may correspond to one another in a phenomenon known as synesthesia. The contribution of Verlaine to the development of Symbolism derives from the intense lyricism of his verse, which inspired an emphasis in late nineteenth-century poetry on the musical possibilities of language, and also prompted a poetic concern with mood rather than meaning. In the poetry of Rimbaud, the visionary nature of Symbolism is conspicuously revealed as the poet assumes the role of seer and advocates the derangement of his senses and abandonment of reason for the illuminations of mysticism. In such works as Le Bateau ivre (1871; The Drunken Boat) and Les Illuminations (1886; Illuminations), which were composed before the author had reached the age of twenty, Rimbaud offers a hallucinatory mode of perception and an intensely original style of poetic expression. Similarly noted for his stylistic innovations in service of a transcendent vision was Mallarmé, who became the central figure in the Symbolist movement both for his role as a mentor to younger poets and for his poetry, which many critics regard as the epitome of Symbolist art. With such poems as “Hérodiade” (1869) and “L’Après-midi d’un faun” (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”) Mallarmé not only provided supreme examples of Symbolist themes and techniques but also engaged in literary experimentation to a degree that anticipated the new direction of modernist literature.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the Symbolists had virtually disappeared from the French literary scene. The deaths of the movement’s leading figures, including Mallarmé in 1898, prompted a steep decline. Although the moment of the Symbolist poets was a short-lived one in French literary history, its effect on the subsequent course of world literature has been lasting and profound; Symbolist poetic influence predominated for decades throughout the world, particularly in Russia, Germany, Eastern Europe, and Japan. Furthermore, a number of the leading French writers of the modernist period, most prominently Paul Valéry and Paul Claudel, continued to follow many of the principles of Symbolism in their work. Succeeded by various avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, Symbolism is often recognized as the source of the modern artistic temper as characterized by formal experimentation and alienation from society. Finalizing scholarly assessments of Symbolist poetics, however, has remained as elusive as some of most deeply enigmatic works composed by Baudelaire or Mallarmé.

Synesthesia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other uses, see Synesthesia (disambiguation).

How someone with synesthesia might perceive certain letters and numbers.

Synesthesia (also spelled synæsthesia or synaesthesia, plural synesthesiæ or synæsthesiæ), from the ancient Greek σύν (syn), “together,” and αἴσθησις (aisthēsis), “sensation,” is a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.[1][2][3][4] People who report such experiences are known as synesthetes. Recently, difficulties have been recognized in finding an adequate definition of synesthesia[5][6], as many different phenomena have been covered by this term and in many cases the term synesthesia (“union of senses”) seems to be a misnomer. A more accurate term for the phenomenon may be ideasthesia.

In one common form of synesthesia, known as grapheme → color synesthesia or color-graphemic synesthesia, letters or numbersare perceived as inherently colored,[7][8] while in ordinal linguistic personification, numbers, days of the week and months of the year evoke personalities.[9][10] In spatial-sequence, or number form synesthesia, numbers, months of the year, and/or days of the week elicit precise locations in space (for example, 1980 may be “farther away” than 1990), or may have a (three-dimensional) view of a year as a map (clockwise or counterclockwise).[11][12][13] Yet another recently identified type, visual motion → sound synesthesia, involves hearing sounds in response to visual motion and flicker.[14] Over 60 types of synesthesia have been reported,[15] but only a fraction have been evaluated by scientific research.[16] Even within one type, synesthetic perceptions vary in intensity[17] and people vary in awareness of their synesthetic perceptions.[18]

While cross-sensory metaphors (e.g., “loud shirt,” “bitter wind” or “prickly laugh”) are sometimes described as “synesthetic”, true neurological synesthesia is involuntary. It is estimated that synesthesia could possibly be as prevalent as 1 in 23 persons across its range of variants.[19] Synesthesia runs strongly in families, but the precise mode of inheritance has yet to be ascertained. Synesthesia is also sometimes reported by individuals under the influence of psychedelic drugs, after a stroke, during a temporal lobe epilepsy seizure, or as a result of blindness or deafness. Synesthesia that arises from such non-genetic events is referred to as “adventitious synesthesia” to distinguish it from the more common congenital forms of synesthesia. Adventitious synesthesia involving drugs or stroke (but not blindness or deafness) apparently only involves sensory linkings such as sound → vision or touch → hearing; there are few, if any, reported cases involving culture-based, learned sets such as graphemes, lexemes, days of the week, or months of the year.

Although synesthesia was the topic of intensive scientific investigation in the late 19th century and early 20th century, it was largely abandoned by scientific research in the mid-20th century, and has only recently been rediscovered by modern researchers.[20] Psychological research has demonstrated that synesthetic experiences can have measurable behavioral consequences, while functional neuroimaging studies have identified differences in patterns of brain activation.[8] Many people with synesthesia use their experiences to aid in their creative process, and many non-synesthetes have attempted to create works of art that may capture what it is like to experience synesthesia. Psychologists and neuroscientists study synesthesia not only for its inherent interest, but also for the insights it may give into cognitive and perceptual processes that occur in synesthetes and non-synesthetes alike.

Emotion and mathematics

Uncategorized

‘We don’t work hard for logical reasons. Emotion is what drives us.’

A interesting article here – ECSTATHY ATHEISM, SKEPTICISM, SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY.

“An equation is just another way of expressing the relationship between two or more things — or two or more forces. Emotional Equations help illuminate relationships — the relationships between one emotion and another and how the mix of two emotions may lead to a third,” says Conley.

Businessman, speaker, and author Chip Conley believes emotions have a scientific logic. By identifying the equations of your own circumstances, you can work through negatives and find your way to a more meaningful life — to understand yourself, your purpose, and your relationships with others. Emotions = Life.

‘Emotional fluency is the ability to sense, translate, and effectively apply the power of emotions in a healthy and productive manner. Yet most of us have more training in how to use our car or computer than we do in how to use our emotions in work and life. Welcome to driver’s ed for your emotions. Fasten your seat belts, please.’

Read more: http://www.care2.com/greenliving/emotions-math-insight-video.html#ixzz1yP8nVsjd

Bad Intuition

Uncategorized

When Our Intuition Leads Us to Bad Decisions

By JOHN M. GROHOL, PSYD
Founder & Editor-in-Chief

‘The key to successful decision making is knowing when to trust your intuition and when to be wary of it. And that’s a message that has been drowned out in the recent celebration of intuition, gut feelings, and rapid cognition.’

When Our Intuition Leads Us to Bad Decisions Six years ago, Malcolm Gladwell released a book entitled Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. In his usual style, Gladwell weaves stories in-between descriptions of scientific research the support his hypothesis that our intuition can be surprisingly accurate and right.

One year ago, authors Daniel J. Simons and Christopher F. Chabris, writing inThe Chronicle of Higher Education not only had some choice words for Gladwell’s cherry-picking of the research, but also showed how intuition probably only works best in certain situations, where there is no clear science or logical decision-making process to arrive at the “right” answer. For instance, when choosing which ice cream is “best.”

Reasoned analysis, however, works best in virtually every other situation. Which, as it turns out, is most situations where big life decisions come into play.

Gladwell also argues that intuition is not always right. But it’s an argument that employs circular reasoning as exemplified in the last chapter, “Listening with your eyes.” In it, he describes how orchestra auditions moved from being un-blinded (meaning the people judging the audition saw people perform their musical pieces) to blinded (meaning the judges did not view or see who played what piece).

The argument Gladwell makes from this example is that the judge’s intuition was influenced by previously-unrecognized factors — the gender of the performer, what type of musical instrument they were playing, even their race. But that intuition was eventually corrected, because we can change what our intuition tells us:

Too often we are resigned to what happens in the blink of an eye. It doesn’t seem like we have much control over whatever bubbles to the surface from our unconscious. But we do, and if we can control the environment in which rapid cognition takes place, then we can control rapid cognition.

But this is circular reasoning. We often don’t know our intuition is wrong until long after the fact, or unless we conduct a scientific experiment that shows how truly wrong it is. For hundreds of years, conductors and other judges trusted their intuition about how to choose their orchestra players and for hundreds of years, they were horribly wrong. It was only through a freak accident of chance that they learned how wrong they were, as Gladwell describes it.

We don’t know when to trust our intuition in the future, because we have only hindsight in which to see whether we were right or not.

This hardly seems like something you can hang your hat on, that you can look to always (or even ever) reasonably “control the environment” where you’re making intuitive judgments.

As Simons and Chabris — authors of the book, The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us — note, trusting your intuition can have serious consequences and even put other people’s lives at jeopardy:

Flawed intuitions about the mind extend to virtually every other domain of cognition. Consider eyewitness memory. In the vast majority of cases in which DNA evidence exonerated a death-row inmate, the original conviction was based largely on the testimony of a confident eyewitness with a vivid memory of the crime. Jurors (and everyone else) tend to intuitively trust that when people are certain, they are likely to be right.

Eyewitnesses consistently trust their own judgment and memory of events they witness. Scientific research, and now efforts like the Innocence Project, show how flawed that intuition is.

Here’s another example:

Consider talking or texting on a cellphone while driving. Most people who do this believe, or act as though they believe, that as long as they keep their eyes on the road, they will notice anything important that happens, like a car suddenly braking or a child chasing a ball into the street. Cellphones, however, impair our driving not because holding one takes a hand off the wheel, but because holding a conversation with someone we can’t see—and often can’t even hear well—uses up a considerable amount of our finite capacity for paying attention.

That is a key point, one missed by virtually everyone who insiststhey can text or talk on their cellphone. Their intuition tells them that it’s safe as long as they act like they’re paying attention. But they’re not. Their attention is clearly divided, using up precious and limited cognitive resources.

It’s like trying to take the SAT while at a rock concert of your favorite band. You may complete the SAT, but chances are you’re either going to do badly on it, or not be able to remember the playlist, much less many of the most memorable moments, of the concert.

Intuition is like that — we can’t trust it instinctually, as Gladwell suggests, because it is so often just plain wrong. And we can’t know ahead of time when it’s likely to be wrong in a really, really bad way.

The Invisible GorillaOne last example, in case you’re not convinced, having to do with the common wisdom that when you don’t know the answer in a multiple choice test, stick with your intuition:

Most students and professors have long believed that, when in doubt, test-takers should stick with their first answers and “go with their gut.” But data show that test-takers are more than twice as likely to change an incorrect answer to a correct one than vice versa.

In other words, reasoned analysis — not intuition — often works best. The exact opposite of Gladwell’s assertion.

As the authors note, “Gladwell (knowingly or not) exploits one of the greatest weaknesses of intuition—our tendency to blithely infer cause from anecdotes—in making his case for intuition’s extraordinary power.”

Indeed, we see this no better than in politics, and so it has special importance with the upcoming campaign season almost here. Politicians will make outrageous claims that has no basis in actual evidence or the facts. The most common claim that will be made in the upcoming presidential election, for example, will be that the Federal government can have a direct influence or impact on the economy. Short of actually spending Federal dollars to create jobs (e.g., the federal works programs of the 1930s during the GreatDepression), the government has a much more limited ability to influence the economy than most people understand.

Part of this is because even economists — the scientists who understand the complexities of modern economies — are at odds over how economies and recessions really work. If the experts can’t agree, what makes anyone think any type of government action actually produces results? And without hard data, as Simons and Chabris note, we have no idea whether government interventions actually make the recovery worse:

In a recent issue of The New Yorker, John Cassidy writes about U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s efforts to combat the financial crisis. “It is inarguable,” writes Cassidy, “that Geithner’s stabilization plan has proved more effective than many observers expected, this one included.”

It’s easy for even a highly educated reader to pass over a sentence like that one and miss its unjustified inference about causation. The problem lies with the word “effective.” How do we know what effect Geithner’s plan had? History gives us a sample size of only one—in essence, a very long anecdote. We know what financial conditions were before the plan and what they are now (in each case, only to the extent that we can measure them reliably—another pitfall in assessing causality), but how do we know that things wouldn’t have improved on their own had the plan never been adopted? Perhaps they would have improved even more without Geithner’s intervention, or much less.

Anecdotes are great illustrators and help us connect with boring scientific data. But using anecdotes to illustrate only one side of the story — the story you want to sell us — is intellectually dishonest. That’s what I find authors like Gladwell doing, time and time again.

Intuition has its place in the world. But believing it is a reliable cognitive device in most situations that we should trust more often than not is sure to get you into trouble. Relying more often on intuition instead of reasoning is not something that I believe is supported by our current psychological understanding and research.

Read the full Chronicle article now (it’s lengthy, but makes for a good read): The Trouble With Intuition

Gerd Gigerenzer, director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and author ofGut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious (Viking, 2007), takes a more benign view of intuition: Intuitive heuristics are often well adapted to the environments in which the human mind evolved, and they yield surprisingly good results even in the modern world. For example, he argues, choosing to invest in companies based on whether you recognize their names can produce reasonably good returns. The same holds for picking which tennis player is likely to win a match. Recognition is a prime example of intuitive, rapid, effortless cognition. Gigerenzer’s book jacket describes his research as a “major source for Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink,” but the popular veneration of intuitive decision-making that sprang from Blink and similar works lacks the nuance of Gigerenzer’s claims or those of other experimental psychologists who have studied the strengths and limits of intuition.

‘

We filmed the basketball-passing game with a single camera and, like Neisser, we had a female research assistant stroll through the game with an open umbrella. We also made a version in which we replaced the umbrella woman with a woman in a full-body gorilla suit, even having her stop in the middle of the game, turn toward the camera, thump her chest, and exit on the other side of the display nine seconds later. People might miss a woman, we thought, but they would definitely see a gorilla.

We were wrong. Fifty percent of the subjects in our study failed to notice the gorilla! Later research by others, with equipment that tracks subjects’ eye movements, showed that people can miss the gorilla even when they look right at it. We were stunned, and so were the subjects themselves. When they viewed the video a second time without counting the passes, they often expressed shock: “I missed that?!” A few even accused us of sneakily replacing the “first tape” with a “second tape” that had a gorilla added in.

The finding that people fail to notice unexpected events when their attention is otherwise engaged is interesting. What is doubly intriguing is the mismatch between what we notice and what we think we will notice. In a separate study, Daniel Levin, of Vanderbilt University, and Bonnie Angelone, of Rowan University, read subjects a brief description of the gorilla experiment and asked them whether they would see the gorilla. Ninety percent said yes. Intuition told those research subjects (and us) that unexpected and distinctive events should draw attention, but our gorilla experiment revealed that intuition to be wrong. There are many cases in which this type of intuition—a strong belief about how our own minds work—can be consistently, persistently, and even dangerously wrong.’

Zinaida Serebriakova

Creativity, Feminism, Psychology

I have been reading from the following site, http://www.escapeintolife.com and using passages from the text there to start of this post, influenced by the Russian female artist Zinaida Yevgenyevna Serebriakova  (December 10, 1884 – September 19, 1967)

What then of the Serebriakova nudes? They are not in the sense of the modernist art canon really striking – there is no deconstruction of the female body, nor are they particularly provocative in their poses. One needs only have to compare them with the other nudes of the period by Henri Matisse or Amedeo Modigliani. But this might not be the whole truth because when she painted her nudes during the Silver Age period she did so as a challenge to the male dominated genre – as did Goncharova. The very act of a woman artist painting a nude of herself was a feminist act in that she became the subject rather than object.

ImageAt The Dressing Table, 1909, by Zinaida Serebriakova

This notion of the artist or even the model being able to engage in the same practices as men, without succumbing to alienation or gender heresy, is very contentious. Today in the era of post-pornography, where pornography as a cultural space of the male has been opened to feminist empowerment (through “cunt” power politics), the re-framing or re-figuring of women’s art on those terms has perhaps over emphasised the synchronic over the diachronic or historical context. They also often forget that women artists had to earn money, and this meant they had to negotiate with a male dominated art market. Consider by way of example, Anais Nin’s apparently duplicitous role in her writing pornography for a male orientated market, and her private-but-public erotic exposes in her autobiographical writings. What’s the difference? That’s at the heart of the problem of the nude.

Reclining Nude, 1930, Zinaida Serebriakova

This painting below would not have passed the Stalinist-run art institutions’ standards as the pose is 1) not maternal (connoting Mother Russia or Soviet Mother) 2) atheletic 3) ethnic or ethographical. But the head with rosy apple cheeks is typical of socialist realist women’s heads. The Soviet Union would have to wait many years until a nude like the below could be accepted – and now such paintings are in great demand, the market directed by the fact it is Russian and erotic to a certain extent. If we compare the painting with the 1911 nude, we see that it is altogether rougher in the outlines and the flesh tones, especially the pinks, are in the ascendant – exaggerating the nipples. Also note the pubic hair, something that troubled the censors for years.

Reclining Nude, 1935, Zinaida Serebriakova

What of Serebriakova’s pastels like this one:

A Young Moroccan Girl, 1928, Zinaida Serebriakova

Is the work beautiful because the “object” is different? Does her difference make the pastel more “desirable”? Again, the painting is anachronistic and similar to, say, the French and German Orientalists – the very artists who Edward Said deconstructed! An example of this is the Odalisque by Ingres:

Odalisque with Slave, 1839, by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867)

This painting above actually provides us with an excellent point of departure for re-reading the Serebriakova nudes – because nearly all her nudes have an identical pose with the arms behind the head, and many have that generalised palette which gives the impression of a sculpture. The Ingres painting has often been interpreted as a male fantasy – the woman who is a slave and available whenever the man needs her. If we could in a rather flippant manner compare the erotics of art to drug addiction, then these nudes are like C class drugs or C class (soft) pornography with all the problems that entails. Does Serebriakova deserve her reputation? Can we criticize her art after the Silver Period as being anachronistic, and racist at times? Can a female nude painting by a woman of a different ethnic background be excused because the painting is by a woman?

These questions perplex and confront those campaigning to recover the woman artist and her canon. Does she “own” the female body when she paints it – or is the painting like all art open to arbitariness? When someone takes “an innocent” picture of themselves, where they sincerely believe that it is “beautiful”, the same photograph taken out of context becomes pornography. Can the body lose its carnality? The Soviet nude shows us that like the Nazi nude, she is at once a symbol of the power of the state, a mother, a symbol of healthiness, of racial supremacy (or dominance), and at the same time the object of carnal interest.

The glasses model – perceptive reality

existentialism, Psychology, Spirituality

This post has taken direct influence, and to begin with, words, from http://timeforchange.org

This post is about how we perceive everything, as human animals.. Specifically the question of Objective and Subjective reality.

‘If we assume that theImage subjective influencing of the neutral picture happens in our subconscious, we can imagine there is a large collection of different pairs of glasses there. According to which pair of glasses is held in front of us by our subconscious state, we interpret the picture in a different way which then moves us for example to feel fear, anger, consternation, apathy, joy or sadness. Our perception is determined by the respective glasses.

This is not all about always wearing rose-coloured glasses, so that everything is felt to be «good». It is of course possible to be tempted to outwit our subconscious by some kind of technique so that we see everything through rose-coloured glasses. However in the end we would be deceiving ourselves to the extent that we would be fighting the symptoms and not the causes.

Earlier we have described how the objective of all human beings is to live the basic rights of existence in every situation in order to attain a permanent state of harmony within ourselves. With the «glasses model» and subjective perception we could also describe this as a state in which our perception is no longer impaired by glasses, in which we no longer judge but we can accept everything calmly as it is.

We must emphasize once again however that this calmness must not be confused with the wearing of rose-coloured glasses which allows everything to appear cheerful and good. The rose-coloured glasses would also be a judgement which – it is true – would normally appear to us to be pleasant. However we would then judge everything in life to be good and go through life like a lunatic with a fixed smile.

Subjective perception (perceptive reality) is a very powerful aid to personal development. So that it can function properly it needs only one – but very important – precondition: Of our own volition and without conditions we must want to respect the basic rights of existence in every situation. This development does not take place of its own accord.

Our subconscious helps us with subjective perception (glasses model), the activation of our objectives (tuning bowl model) and additional mechanisms permit us to interpret things such that we can efficiently train for the abovementioned goals. We develop our awareness and accept the full responsibility for our life (self-responsibility). This is our personal path to harmony and inner peace.’

Jürg Rohrer

Jürg Rohrer is from Buchs, Switzerland, Graduate in Engineering from the ETH (Technical University) Zürich, was initially active as Development Manager and Crisis Manager both at home and abroad, since 1991 he has been a self-employed entrepreneur in the fields of environmental technology and IT. These companies have already been presented with several international awards for their innovative technologies and ideas. His main concern is the integration of high ethical values into the everyday commercial world. He is the author of the book series “Time for Change”.

In addition he has been working as lecturer for renewable energy systems and efficient use of energy.

The following is from http://www.lifehack.org

‘Change Your Story, Change Your Perception, Change Your Life

We all get caught up in our stories. Most of us think we are our stories. It’s when those stories take on a life of their own, and that life isn’t the one we want, that things start to suck.

Think about the story you’re living right now. Who wrote it? Did you consciously decide to create the reality you’re living now, or was it mainly shaped by your parents, friends, spouse, school, or the media? If you don’t like the story your living, then change the perception. Envision how you’d write the next chapter of your story. Better yet, actually sit down and write it. Focus your perception on creating a new reality, one where you are in charge of the story. Take back the job as screenwriter and director, and stop just being an actor

Everything begins with a decision – decide now to be in charge of your own perception of reality. Because if you don’t, there are plenty of folks whose sole purpose in life is to craft that perception for you. Do you trust them to have your best interest in mind…?

Tony D. Clark writes, draws cartoons, designs software and websites, and spends a lot of time talking others into working from home, being creative, and doing what they love. His blog Success from the Nest focuses on helping parents who want to do meaningful work from home and have more time for their families, and their dreams.‘