Noticing What We Notice...
🔥Welcome to volume 0000013!🔥
I’m Christian Champ. This is the ☯️Middle Way Newsletter ☯️. It is a place where I write, explore and share ideas. The Middle Way is your path.
🔎Noticing What You Are Noticing… 🔎
We see what are looking for. When my first child was born, I immediately noticed all the children in the neighborhood. It felt like everywhere I looked there was a playground filled with kids. Once the lens of child entered my eyes, I couldn't stop seeing them. Getting a dog led to this same phenomenon. The number of dogs or children didn’t change, what I noticed changed.
When was the last time you noticed what you were noticing?
We preload our brain with what we are looking for and then we find it. Life offers all these things that we don't see until we open to that frequency. Then they show up everywhere.
If you want examples that the world is falling apart and you tune it, you will see the world falling apart. If you want examples that the world is getting better, then you will see the world getting better.
The question for us is what do we want to notice? What do we want to see in the world? Noticing it and tuning it is the first step in making it happen.
What are you noticing that you are noticing? What do you want to be noticing? What surprised you after you noticed it?
📓Articles to Read📓
#1 Things that interest us
#2 Things that can have an impact
But I can give you a framework because choosing what to invest in is a lot like choosing what to work on. One is an investment of money (and time). The other is an investment of time and yourself. The latter is such a larger investment and the risks are much higher. But the framework is similar.
Circular Time vs. Linear Time by Austin Kleon
The non-linear view allows us to keep coming back to a new starting point. We get to loop it so we’ve never “arrived”.
I like this because it gets ride of the idea of when xyz happens I’ll be there and instead it is always happening!
The problem is, many people don’t think the universe, life and consciousness are especially weird. When I talk to my students about the weirdness of existence, they often look baffled. They think I’m weird for insisting that existence is weird. And in fact leading thinkers believe that science has already told us so much about the world and about ourselves that it has dissipated the mystery of things.
📚 Books to Read 📚
New Dark Age by James Bridle
James focuses on the risks of technology and increasing complexity from relying too heavily on tech.
Data can be helpful or it can create more noise vs. signal. It is not the magic elixir (the dreams of big data and AI is mainly magical thinking).
We can’t see what is in front of us and acknowledging the darkness is how we see the light. We need to acknowledge the complex system and what we don’t know to figure out what we do know.
Virginia Wolf wrote in 1915 “the future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think”.
The Human Network by Matthew O. Jackson
The book focuses on the power of networks and how they can push our beliefs, behaviors and life outcomes.
Biggest take away is make sure you add randomness in your sources for information and have a broad network of disjointed friends/contacts to escape group think. Noise is everywhere and like the Dark Age book it is incumbent upon us to understand networks, homophily and be vigilant for finding the signal.
🎙️ Listen / Watch 📺
Santa Fe Institute Podcast featuring W. Brian Arthur (Part I): The History of Complex Economics
There is no equilibrium in the economy
It is a massive complex system
Why all economic models are flawed
Using biology as a guide to the economic system
Crazy Wisdom Podcast featuring What does it mean to love oneself? w/ Kamal Ravikant
Wire our neurons and focus on love
Look into the mirror and saying I love myself as a meditation
Going all in on inner growth and choosing to love yourself more (this is a great challenge)
Turn on the light in the darkness
Grow the mind strength of love like a muscle grows with practice
Love opens up creativity and the best you
Personal alchemy for Kamal is taking love and transferring it into what he is doing… inner work shakes the outer work
Harness the ability to notice emotions and shift them
💣Words of Wisdom💣
Dan Gilbert -
‘Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you’ve ever been. The one constant in our life is change.’
Thinking in New Boxes - Luc De Brabandere, Alan Iny
To be clear: Fully understanding the world, in all of its complexity, is impossible. Thus, although Step 2 primarily entails collecting and assessing lots of relevant information, we believe that sustaining the doubt you nurtured in Step 1 remains critical. Step 2 is not fundamentally about “understanding” but about seeking to understand. It is less about asking, “How much can I learn about my subject matter” as it is about asking, “Am I posing the best questions possible? Am I pondering my current answers with sufficient doubt? What ideas and outlooks am I clinging to that no longer make sense? How can I change them to make more creativity possible?
Ram Dass -
“The most exquisite paradox: as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all. … As long as you want power, you can’t have it. The minute you don’t want power, you’ll have more than you ever dreamed possible.”
“You’re only making a mess by trying to put things straight. You’re trying to straighten out a wiggly world and no wonder you’re in trouble.”
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
What are you noticing that you are noticing?
Any thoughts, comments or ideas to share, please reach out.
Be joyful!
Namaste,
Christian
