Like a sphinx sits Destiny
On the limitless plain of the world, -
The fixed stone Image of Ages,
Mother of Dreams and Titanic Achievements, -
While the multitudes clamor around her
Confronting the Unknown.

But I abide below her,
Prone on her great robes, looking up,
Confidence unbounded in my soul;
For I am Power – a sun to pierce her heart;
I am Faith – a flaming will to soften it;
I league with the mighty certainties;
Laws, facts, axioms, principles, goods,
To coerce her eternal inertia
Into a voice of concession,
And the sovereign smile of bestowal,
And the open hand.

Oh, I know with a fiery knowing
Mine own good treasures shall come. -
It is true! It is true! It is marvelous true!
I and the Mother grim
Quite understand.
I can wait
On my fate,
But, elate,
I confide in the fixed stone Image of Ages -
Destiny.

Poem by Frank Channing Haddock

I downloaded the first chapter and read the story of how the light bulb was invented. As it turned out, Edison was a master team builder. The leaders of each team were called experimenters and they were given a free hand to produce results.

Edison would give them shares in the companies that were set up to produce and sell the various inventions.

What was interesting to me was the contrast between what actually took place and what we were taught in school. We were programmed to think we had to do it all on our own.

If only we had been taught things like team building and how to make and manage money back in the 50′s. I hope the young people today have the wisdom to capitalize on the opportunity to learn about these things online, even if they are still not being taught in the schools

Today I had breakfast with a friend at Cora’s in Pickering. My wife and I first went to Cora’s in St. Jean sur Richelieu in Quebec many years ago. Our son was attending prep school there prior to RMC in Kingston.

During breakfast, which was absolutely delicious, i go involve in a conversation with  French truck driver. The experience was fascinating. he spoke no English and I spoke my broken high school French, but we had a lively discussion.

Looking back on my high school French experience, the lack of actual conversation in this language stands out as one of the distinguishing drawbacks. None had ever heard of French immersion in those days, although there were summer exchange programs for those lucky enough to get them.

I lived in Montreal for the first six yeas of my life and then again back in the late ’50s for a year.

Our breakfast at Cora’s in Pickering was a huge success. The decor was happy and brignt, the service excellent and the ham and Swiss cheese omelet spectacular.

Here is their website. http://www.chezcora.com/a/01-belle-histoire/index2-a.htm

Their social media strategy is non existent as far as I can tell.

What’s the address of your goal? Maybe Google will provide one some day. “Google Goals”.

The gracious light, in semi-sphere
Created by the living soul,
Encompasses the vision’s whole
Of worlds afar and atoms near.

The vault of heaven, gemmed and deep,
And earth and sea o’erwhelmed in light,
Full complements of thought invite
That soul may all its empire keep.

And so the world within the flesh
The larger gains, and grows apace
To Truth’s ideal and Beauty’s grace
With understanding ever fresh.

Yet must the Wider Life emerge
Within the lesser, welling up,
If living spirit’s wine-filled cup
Reflect the Drama’s drift and urge.

What seest thou? Thy self alone;
Thou art the world and all its parts.
And this is being’s Art of Arts’
To know the faster Life thine own.

Frank Channing Haddock

Back in the 70′ s we used to pay big bucks to media-watch services.

As the internet age unfolded, surfers for information on companies and products quickly discovered they could forage through various channels, bookmark what they found and then try to make sense of it all.

Then aggregators such as Kosmix came along, advances  in the technology which enabled surfers to rapidly assemble  a webpage that included all the various posts referring to a particular business or individual. This software scours the internet and harvests references, blogs, forums, video, photos etc into one convenient format, giving the viewer an instant corporate profile so to speak.

Other programs exist to compliment these aggregating services, but the technology needed development and disparate data remained in separate silos.

Advances in other discipline are now finding their way into the new market of Social Media transactions.

In the stock trading world back in the late 80’s and early 90’s, we charted by hand, day by day and then drew trendlines and indicators. When trading software arrived, like Super Charts, it was a real blessing.

Later however, as the technology grew more sophisticated, we got sentiment indicators and  ‘market carpets’ along with a variety of exotic technical analytics.

A market carpet is a visual mosaic of sectors and their stocks. Each square represents a stock and is color coded according to its performance over a period of time. As you hover your cursor over the square, links to the stock pop up. There is a simple chart on the right with chicklets and links which drill down into more advanced analytics.

Market Carpet for TSE – TD Bank  in the Financial Sector

Thanks to Looking Glass, these advances are now being applied to the social media marketing phenomena. This  ‘listening post’ operates using the same principles that underlie technical analysis in the investment world.

For each company that is listed in the “exchange”, the program will return all the information it finds and aggregate  it in one place. For example, in the image below, all the twitter, facebook, and blog mentions are represented as a bar graph.

The large reddish bar above indicates there was a spike of activity on Twitter This is an indicator and it triggers  an alert so the appropriate action can be taken by the company’s marketing department. Collaboration tools within the corporation and its verticles make sharing of this information easy and result in quick decisions and actions.

Here is Stephen Kim of Microsoft explaining how this works.

The many advances been made in other disciplines are now filtering over into the new social media landscape. As in the technical analysts of stocks and commodities,  there will be more sophisticated ways of measuring and responding to social transaction, patterns of behavior that are relatively stable in human nature.

Scientific experiment has established that 50% or more of the information we receive through the five-senses is edited or altered in some way.

For example, these experiments have shown that we do not see up to 50%, and more, of what comes ‘through’ our eyes because it is filtered out by the temporal lobes of the brain on the basis of our conditioned belief – before it gets to the visual cortex, the point at which we actually ‘see’. It is our brain that sees, not our eyes. The eyes only provide information (light) and it is the mind that decides what to make of it.  It is the same with hearing and the rest of the 5 senses.

Human indoctrinability

This knowledge about the structure of perception and the filtering process of  the temporal lobes has been practically applied to create a technique of manipulation we know as hypnosis.

Whatever our mind/brain is conditioned to see or not see, it will either see or edit out.

In “The Holographic Universe”, Michael Talbot recalls an experience he had that confirms what I am suggesting here. He says that in the mid 1970s his father hired a professional hypnotist to entertain a group of friends. One of those chosen to be hypnotized was a man called Tom and this was the first time Tom had met the hypnotist. What stage hypnotists do is to program a person to believe they are seeing something or doing something that is pure invention. For example, making people believe they are seeing the audience naked or they are a dog or a mouse or whatever. Talbot recounts how this hypnotist made Tom believe there was a giraffe in the room and also eat a raw potato, believing it to be an apple. All this is confirmation that the brain sees and experiences what it is programmed to believe it sees and experiences.

But the most profound part of the story came when Tom was brought back to ‘waking’ consciousness. Just before the hypnotist ended the formal trance state, he told Tom that when he awoke he would not be able to see his daughter, Laura. The hypnotist asked Laura to stand right in front of her father so that when he opened his eyes he would be looking at her stomach. Tom was asked if he could see his daughter. “No”, he replied. Laura was even giggling, but it made no difference.

The hypnotist hid behind Laura and held something against the small of her back. To see it, Tom would have had to see through his daughter. The hypnotist asked Tom what he was holding in his hand and, leaning forward looking at the stomach of his daughter, he said: “A watch.” He was asked if he could read the inscription and, squinting to read the small writing, he did so. The hypnotist revealed that he was indeed holding a watch with that inscription.

Tom’s mind had been programmed to believe he could not see his daughter and so he didn’t. More than that, he could see what was behind her.

How is this possible?

We construct our reality ‘in here’ not ‘out there’. More on the process and a full explanation of how this occurred in my next blog.

They are wizards. Their store is amazing. It’s like walking through a door and suddenly being in a different world – like something out of Tolkien. No computers, no internet, just jars and jars of herbs with exotic names.  And a herbalist-wizard, who blends her potions for you on the spot, decants them into brown paper bags and painstakingly hand-writes the ingredients and instructions on the bag with a black magic marker.

I found Thuna’s way back  in the mid 80′s when they helped diagnose my gluten free problem, and for that I owe them endless gratitude for my years of freedom from this horrible affliction.

Here’s how it happened.

At that time I was in terrible shape. I was bleeding internally and in constant pain. (This was before the days of their being so much knowledge out there regarding gluten intolerance.)

Back in the mid 80′s I was living then on Monarch Park in the Danforth in Toronto, and one day while out walking I saw their sign. I went in to purchase some supplements as  I was constantly fatigued. I spoke to a lady there – her name was Eleanor – and during our conversation she pointed to a door leading to a narrow staircase. I went upstairs to the 2nd floor office and at the entrance there was a small sign that read ‘R.  Macneil MD, Naturopath’.

I went upstairs and there he was, sitting behind a large wooden desk in a bush shirt with his feet up. There was a small examination room next to the office.

He agreed to see me right away and told me his story. A medical doctor, who had issues with the prescribing of drugs, he had decided to set up as a naturopath.

I vented my woes – years of pain, the bleeding, the fatigue, brain fog, the tightness in my neck at certain times, feelings of depression. And the list of doctors and treatments, – valium perscriptions, pain kilers, referrals to psychiatrists – anyone with this problem knows all about this!

He listened patiently until I wound down, and said quietly, I think I can help you …

I was skeptical as you can well imagine and said,  “How can you possibly know what the problem is, you haven’t even examined me”  – glancing over to the examination room. I had expected the usual long and protracted exploration.

“I can examine you if you really want me to but I don’t need to ” he snapped,  “I know exactly what’s wrong with you. I could tell the moment you walked in that you have a food allergy, probably to wheat.”

Then he proceeded to tell me all about gluten and it’s effects and advised me to stop eating anything with wheat, corn, eggs and a few other things for  few weeks and com back to see him in a few weeks.

As I was leaving he recommended that I read ‘Dr. Mandell’s 5-Day allergy relief system’ .

This was the beginning of my healing and my gluten free journey which ultimately lead me to my soul mate and a way to help thousands of people with this condition.

More on this, and my return to Thuna’s  in my next blog.