July 23, 2014

Great Time Magazine Article about Speaking

I haven’t posted in a while but I came across this article and hope it will be as beneficial to you guys out there as it was to me. God bless.

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A wise Arab proverb says, “Every war begins with words.”

In the teachings of Islamic spirituality there is much that is written about the importance of restraining the tongue. The tongue is called “the mirror of the heart.” In other words, what appears on our tongue is a chief indicator of what is in our hearts. And, this becomes even truer in those unguarded moments when anger, frustration, or stress gets the best of us and our tongues lose any sense of discipline.

This is, perhaps, why the Prophet Muhammad said that one of the ways of knowing if there is hypocrisy in our hearts is to examine what we say with our tongues when we become angry. If it is foul and vile words, then that is a measure of how much purification of the heart remains.

The masters of Islamic spirituality teach that the heart and the tongue have a two-way relationship. Even though the tongue is the mirror whereas the heart is the reality, if we work on polishing the mirror the reality also becomes polished with time and effort.

So, what does it mean to work on the tongue? It means struggling within ourselves to restrain the tongue from all that is corrupt and ugly, like one would pull back a wild horse, and to train the tongue in the speech of goodness and beauty.

The sages and scholars of Islamic spirituality warn that the tongue should be guarded from the following 8 types of speech: lying; breaking promises or oaths; speaking ill of others or slandering; wrangling, arguing and disputing with others without any clear benefit or when you fear it will get out of hand; self-justification or self-praise in a way that leads to arrogance; cursing or using foul language; invoking evil on creatures even if they are your worst enemies; jesting, ridiculing, and scoffing at people in a way that hurts people’s feelings or gives them a bad reputation – this is even worse when this type of speech is directed toward an entire community of people.

Each one of these has their specific descriptions and treatments, but in summary there are five steps that we can take to become more aware of our speech and to polish our tongues, according to the spiritual teachers:

1) Knowledge: Just be aware of the 8 types of speech that you should avoid. Knowledge leads to introspection and introspection leads to reform. When you notice any of these ailments on your tongue, take yourself to task and work to change you condition.

2) Silence: The Prophet Muhammad said that “anyone who believes in God and the Last Day should either speak well or remain silent.” Silence is golden, so goes the saying. Thinking before you speak is the key. One of the great sages of Islam and Caliph after the Prophet Muhammad would place a small stone underneath his tongue and move it to speak only after considering whether what he had to say was truly beneficial. This might be too difficult of a practice for many of us, but it goes to show how seriously silence was taken among the spiritual elite.

3) Fasting: Increase your days of fasting, for fasting by its nature teaches restraint.

4) Change your surrounding: Keeping good company and keeping yourself busy with good things so that your tongue finds very little opportunity to engage in baseless conversations.

5) Remembering the Divine: Cloaking your tongue with the beautiful names of God and the praise of those names will make your tongue to incline toward that which is beautiful and wholesome. Eventually, ugly speech will be completely antithetical and unnatural to a tongue that is used to beauty.

The remaining days of Ramadan are perfect days to intensify our practice of cultivating a disciplined tongue. These are not only the days of peak restraint but also of increasingly remembering God, seeking forgiveness and longing for salvation.

Original article at: http://time.com/3014362/ramadan-day-25-restraining-the-tongue/

January 17, 2014

The Non-existence of Spirit

MiyamotoMusashiStatueHead_Portrait

“Enact strategy broadly, correctly and openly. Then you will come to think of things in a wide sense and, taking the void as the Way, you will see the Way as void. In the void is virtue, and no evil. Wisdom has existence, principle has existence, the Way has existence, spirit is nothingness.”

– Miyamoto Musashi, Book of Five Rings

In 17th century Japan there lived a swordsman unequaled in martial combat by the name of Miyamoto Musashi. He lived to a ripe old age and repudately never lost a single duel in his lifetime. In his 50s he began to reflect back on his life as a warrior and came to the conclusion that he was invincible, but he was not sure why. He did not claim that he had necessarily been more skillful than all of the swordsmen he faced, yet he was able to defeat every one of them. In his 60s he described the Way in a series of letters to a student, known as The Book of Five Rings.

The book covers a small array of topics but they all share a common theme. Behind every technique, word of advice, and wisdom, there is always the underlying reminder that you must bear yourself with the intention of killing your enemy. Your spirit must stay resolved to this end, lest you fall into defensive or ineffective strategy.

Yet in the last of these five books, the Book of the Void, Musashi explains that the spirit of the true Way is the void spirit. The void, as Musashi puts it, is “bewilderment.” This is to say that it is what exists beyond things that have existence, therefore it is non-existence. It is impossible to grasp “non-existence” in thought, because a thought has existence. In this way he equates it with spirit, as spirit has no tangible existence.

The power of the Void spirit is in its unbiased nature. To cultivate the void spirit one must empty the mind and be fully present in the moment. The void spirit can take on any spirit, and actions spring from the void spirit spontaneously. It is, I think, the essential spirit of nature.

In combat, with rigorous training, the void spirit will allow a fighter to call upon all  of his or her available resources as needed. By emptying the mind, all of your mental and physical faculties are made keenly aware of the present moment. Reflexes are uninhibited in the state of the void spirit, and the unbridled are man’s instincts for survival. In essence, the void spirit takes on whatever form it needs, adapting to the moment, and perceiving that which cannot be seen. As Mushashi would put it…

“You must research this.”

December 6, 2013

How to Build a Nuke

Nuclear_artillery_test_Grable_Event_-_Part_of_Operation_Upshot-Knothole

“Building a basic nuclear weapon is not easy, but not all that hard either. In 1964 the U.S. Army decided to see just how difficult it was. They hired two professors that had Ph.Ds in physics, but no experience with nuclear weapons or access to nuclear secrets. The two were given the task of designing an atomic bomb using only information available to the general public. It took them roughly two years, but in the end they designed an implosion style weapon that could have been made in a local machine shop which could have produced an explosion similar to the Hiroshima bomb.” [1]

Grab Some Uranium

Or preferably Plutonium. You’ll need some sort of large atom that releases high velocity neutrons anyways. The explosion of a nuclear bomb happens because the atoms are are literally blasting each other with neutrons, breaking into smaller atoms which shoot off even more neutrons in the process, breaking even more atoms which shoot off even more neutrons! This process happens in an extremely small amount of time (way less than a second) and is called a chain reaction. The process of breaking the atoms into smaller atoms is called fission. As these atoms are ripping each other apart they are releasing an enormous amount of energy. The amount energy released is described in the famous formula E=mc^2. And trust me, it’s a lot.

nuclear-gen-fusion-diagram

Reach Critical Mass

This is the amount of mass (or atoms) needed to create this kind of nuclear chain reaction. You’ll need about a baseball sized chunk of weapons-grade quality stuff weighing around 35 lb. The good news is Uranium Ore is being conventionally mined on every continent so there’s a chance you might have some under your backyard. With some luck, and a lot of digging you can be well on your way to building your first nuke!

Make it go SUPER-critical:

This is the tricky part. You might want to hire a team of scientists and engineers to take care of this for you if you’re lazy. But if your determined to cut costs and do it yourself, here’s the basic idea on what you have to do to get a real quality explosion.

In order for this bomb to detonate in a fiery explosion and not just a shockwave of radiation, you must hold the materials together long enough for the Uranium to go supercritical. This is not easy to do, as the atoms would much rather shoot away from each other than be violently ripped apart. To do this it is conventional to use detonations all around the material to hold it together. But the pressure must also be distributed uniformly, or the uranium will find a weak point and leak out.

And now you have a Nuclear Warhead!

You’ll still have to build a sophisticated rocket for launching it but the hard part is now all behind you. Congratulations 🙂


Nuclear_Bomb_US__FatMan

So What?

So it took me about an hour on google to figure out the basic mechanics behind a nuclear bomb, and I’ve never even taken a chemistry class. What does this mean? Well, It means that any country (or individual) with a few smart scientists, a lot of money, and the ability to use google could potentially engineer a nuke in a few years. I wouldn’t be surprised if most countries already have nuclear weapons, and the NPT [2] is just a way of trying to keep everybody calm.

Links for Further Study:

[1] http://www.unmuseum.org/buildabomb.htm

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferation_of_Nuclear_Weapons

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-critical-mass.htm

December 4, 2013

Michael Pero – Quote 1

englishcountryroad

“It is more difficult for an adult to learn a foreign language than it is for a child because the adult mind is already “structured” in may ways. Adults already seem know the limits of their capabilities and potential, and most NEVER strive to be anything more that what the parameters of the society in which they belong to and have grow up in bind to them. Take for example inner city blacks, most truly believe that they will never escape the grasp of the getto, so most accept this as a fact and don’t even try to escape through some other avenue. Such as trying to do well in high school and trying somehow to get into college, or by learning a trade or high paying skill, or by some other “legal” avenue. They simply enter into a gang where the odds of then being shot and killed is vastly higher that anywhere else. They do this because they TRULY BELIEVE this is their fate. If you ask the average 40 or 50 year old adult if they have achieved their goals in life and what they dreamed of becoming as a child, 95 percent would say “no”. And then you ask them “why not?? What’s stopping you?” Most would give some economic reason or they would say “I’m too old”.. or “I missed my chance!” “WHY CAN’T YOU GO AFTER YOUR DREAM!.. WHO SAYS.. THAT YOU CANNOT DO IT! YOU ARE NEVER TOO OLD AND IT IS NEVER TOO LATE!” I say and I believe. Life all boil’s down to fear, and whether or not you really have the courage to find out what you are really made of! That’s why most adults find themselves in a job they really aren’t happy with and yet they don’t diverse into anything else, or they stay in an unhappy marriage for years and years. Why? Because of fear!”

~Michael A. Pero

December 2, 2013

The 5 Types of People

HowtoAnylizePeopleonSight_titlepage

“How much do external characteristics tell about a man? They tell, with amazing accuracy, all the basic, fundamental principal traits of his nature. The size, shape and structure of a man’s body tell more important facts about his real self—what he thinks and what he does—than the average mother ever knows about her own child. […] If this sounds impossible, if the seeming incongruity, multiplicity and heterogeneity of human qualities have baffled you, remember that this is exactly how the print in all books and newspapers baffled you before you learned to read.”

This very cool book outlines the 5 basic types of people based on their dominant biological systems. These are:

1) nutritive system (fat people) – “the enjoyer” – the chief distinguishing marks of the Alimentive in the order of their importance are ROUNDED OUTLINES, IMMATURE FEATURES and DIMPLED HANDS.

alimentivetype

2) circulatory system (florid people) – “the thriller” – the chief distinguishing marks of the Thoracic in the order of their importance, are FLUSHED COMPLEXION, HIGH CHEST and LONG WAIST.

thoracictype

3) muscular system (muscular people) – “the worker” – “the chief distinguishing marks of the Muscular, in the order of their importance, are LARGE, FIRM MUSCLES,  A SQUARE JAW and SQUARE HANDS.

musculartype

4) skeletal system (boney people) – “the stayer” – the distinguishing marks of the Osseous, in the order of their importance, are PROPORTIONATELY LARGE BONES FOR THE BODY, PROMINENT JOINTS and A LONG FACE

osseoustype

5) nervous system (cerebral people) – “the thinker” – the chief distinguishing
marks of the Cerebral, in the order of their importance, are the HIGH FOREHEAD and a PROPORTIONATELY LARGE HEAD FOR THE BODY.

cerebraltype

Every person has each of these systems and so displays qualities associated with each, but this book professes that each person also has a dominant system that most greatly influences their personality and body type. It makes sense that genetic predispositions would effect our underlying personality. By recognizing these archetypes, one will be able to “read” any stranger at a glance and determine the basic characteristics of their personality.

HERE is a link for the full text.

I was considering the cerebral type and how it’s connected closely with the nervous system. Being interested in the martial arts I have always considered the wisdom of great warriors such as Miyamoto Musashi and Sun Tzu, but wondered why advanced levels of martial skill were usually accompanied by great mental insights. I believe it has a lot to do with the discipline required to master any art, but in light of the theory proposed by this book it seems that it might also have something to do with the nervous systems connection with the cerebral personality type. The nervous system is important for reflexes, which (albeit trained) are what basically govern hand to hand combat. It makes sense then that a great warrior, who would necessarily have great reflexes, would also then be of the “cerebral” type and thus be predisposed to be, well, pretty smart.