Your Mind is Your Matrix cont'd.

Your Mind is Your Matrix cont'd.

The movie showed in a very compressed way how Neo trains to become proficient in controlling the virtual reality of the system. We can also beat our mind matrix, however, there is no shortcut — taking the pill is not the treatment proper, it is just the beginning. To overcome your mind you need to blaze a trail against the routes of the old habits and this takes days, months or even years. You need reshape the neural pathways that were created years ago and were sculpted by your daily routines...

Reverse magic of dreams come true

As an afterthought to the summary in Happines entry...

What happens when your dream comes true? You feel happy... for a while. Quite often, and this occurs especially regularly when you dreamed of something — a new phone, car, house, you name it — you just get used to it. The state of joy that you had gradually fades.

This is the way our minds work. We get used to something good (and even to something bad — that is why people can survive even extreme hardships).

If you expect that winning millions on a lottery would make you happy you are bound for disappointment :)

Your Mind is Your Matrix

This is your last chance... You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed, and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.
– Morpheus, from the film The Matrix

In the movie Matrix was a virtual reality in which sleeping people were immersed — they were dreaming away their lives supplying the electric power to a mechanical super system. Neo was given a choice of a red/blue pill to get out of the dream world to the real world. Matrix was in a virtual reality that most of the people took for granted and lived by its rules. They accepted them without a hint of reflection. In his journey to awareness Neo realized that the rules are as flexible as he dared stretch them and — later on — make them.

Coming back to reality — we are also dealing with sort of Matrix — Matrix of our minds. Our mind is shaped by what we experience: our education, culture, mass media, family life etc. We live within the world that we accept as natural. Our behavior is the result of the way our minds process reality and react to it. It is not a problem if this is what you accept as good and are comfortable with. Often, however, we behave in a certain way because we feel we cannot do it another way, because it is expected from us or it is plainly done so. These are our matrices. These traditional, compulsive, addictive behaviors that have been programmed for various reasons in our minds.

Are you brave enough to take the red pill? To realize that the compulsions, phobias, wants are real only in... your minds — in your privately nourished matrix?

Ostrów Wlkp. in the early morning...

I had been planning to go to Ostrów for almost a month, but I was waiting for sunny morning weather. I checked the weather forecast on Saturday May 31 and it seemed that I would finally get what I wanted.

I woke at 4.30 am and the sunrise was already in progress. It took a moment to get my children who volunteered for the photo trip out of beds.

On our way to the Marketplace we could see the fiery reflections of the sun in the windows of a building on ul. Wrocławska.

The early Sunday morning Marketplace is so unusual without people and with pervading smooth, ephemeral light...

Check it out below:

June Sunday morning in Ostrów

Motocross race in Ostrów

I was surprised by a motocross race when I visited Ostrów Wlkp. (my home town) on June 1. Although my main reason was shooting Ostrów's Townhall in the early morning, I had a chance to try my hand at "sports" :)

Click the link below for some more photos.

Cross country race in Ostrów Wlkp.

Happiness according to Daniel Gilbert

I decided to go back to Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness.

Shortly, we think about what will make us happy in the future basing on the situation now. When future happens, we (or situation etc.) have changed so much that we no longer can be happy with what we expected would make us happy.

Literary magazines dumped

I dumped several dozens of literary magazines in the street paper recycling bin yesterday. I  had bought them over 20 years ago and I had meant to read them later. They survived a couple of moves to  my new places and one major house redecoration. In the meantime, I settled and started a family, changed profession three times, got through 5 or 6 major interest changes.

When I began a major spring basement cleaning a couple of days ago I decided that they needed to go. Time to move on uncluttered.