Planning the Ocean Cruises, Reading Fiction

 Planning the Ocean Cruises, Reading Fiction

The captain of the ship learns about a good crew, ship construction, trip mapping, and worthy destinations. Some people spend their lives in  building or mapping, but at some point the realization that ready or not, travel is called for, time to move from engineer, builder, to traveler to my destination.

That is me.  One reason why I am conversing so much and reading so much conversation and fiction, less fact, less philosophy, is that I  have to absorb what I want now.  It is not what I used to want, or say, and have never mastered.  It is that time for me to move forward, ready or not, I must move!

Today I have Tarzan and the Ant Men in front of me.  Homer or Adler are not in front of me.  One chapter of Jean Klein will make it.

Jean Klien

“Questioner: In certain situations in life I feel blocked by a fear which prevents me from acting. How can I be free from this obstacle?

Jean Klein: First free yourself from the word, the concept, ‘fear’. It is loaded with memory. Face only the perception. Accept the sensation completely. When the personality who judges and controls is completely absent, when there is no
longer a psychological relationship with the sensation, it is really welcomed and unfolds. Only in welcoming without a welcomer can there be real transformation.

We are in essence one with all existence; when we truly observe ourselves there is

ultimately no observer, only observation— awareness.”

Goal Assessment January 12, 2022

 Begin forwarded message:

From: Frederick Vogt <fvogt@me.com>

Subject: Re: goals; update after 15 Years

Date: January 12, 2022 at 11:59:34 AM EST

To: Harry Vogt <hevogt@gmail.com>, James Vogt <jvogt.cda@gmail.com>

Jim, and Harry

I don’t have an email showing I ever replied to you question below.  I hope I gave you a phone call instead.

My perspective has certainly changed in the last 4 years of my retirement.  I tend to get “addicted” to my goals, and neglect other parts of my life that are not part of a goal. I thought I would live “goal free” as Harry mentions below, but I found my body began to rebel.  I was getting physically out of shape, my belly was getting bigger.  I have found that a certain minimum structure for my days is valuable for keeping fit and healthy, and to keep moving toward my current interests.  As long as I stick to my daily routine, determined by my weekly/monthly plans, everything works well and I feel happy with my life.

My current interests, (but not goals) are:

• to have a better understanding why people behave the way they do, so many people are their own worst enemies and they don’t seem to know it.
• To learn the mathematics that I need to know to understand modern physics books, i.e. number theory, analytic geometry and n-dimensional vector calculus.  These are topics that I covered in college, but I have found it very rewarding to revisit them.  
• To understand the role of concepts in my thinking by watching how my mind works when I work math problems out imaginatively and then formalize them via concepts.  I am amazed to find out how large the role of imagination is in thinking and understanding.
• To read good stories and essays, learn to appreciate good drama on TV or in books and improve my senses of smell and taste.  Compared to Amanda I am almost blind when it comes to smell, taste, appreciating drama, or listening to music.  I am beginning to desire to enhance my experience in these artistic arenas. 

My biggest distraction is the local library system.  I am limiting the number of books I check out at a time, so that I can get more of my own studies and home projects done.  Home projects are to clean out old files, photographs, floppy disks, and email, (like this one).

My worst bad habit is not asserting myself in conversation with others.  I have an underlying fear I won’t be liked.

When I look back on my working life, I realize other things could have been accomplished if I had dedicated myself to those goals, but when I read my old files, and emails from those time periods of my life, I see that I made the best possible choices for who I was at the time.  So no regrets.  

Goals are given to us by the possibilities that we commit to.  We all have possibility via imagination, what is missing willingness commit. If I am not working toward my goals, I ask myself “what is stopping me?”  I write down the answers for clarity and post them on my bathroom mirror.

Frederick N. Vogt
410-746-1502 cell
fnvogt@gmail.com
fvogt@mac.com

On Dec 11, 2006, at 8:53 PM, Harry Vogt <hvogt@metrocast.net> wrote:

Brain Surgery September 4th

Started writing a reply to your email yesterday afternoon.  It turns out that I write “like a nut,” doing lengthy documents that are barely connected to the idea and carry crazy implications.  What I write in the afternoon tends to be worse that what I can write in the morning.

I can do it better by keeping it brief.  I had to have brain surgery September 4th due to microbial infection of my brain.  My surgery has worked out well (by the doctors standards, seems terrible to me).  We saw my doctor yesterday for a quick check on his part.  I didn’t know exactly who he was, (typical symptom of brain surgery), until he told me.  I thought he was a potential member of his staff.  I was surprised that the actual surgeon wanted to check with me.

Your complaints about visiting nurses and various types of therapy weakly matches my experience.  My visitors did speak English and were understandable.  Had one or two good visits, but the majority were poorly prepared nurses.  A couple of them were so bad that Amanda called the medical clinic and reported that we did not want to see xxx, yyy, ever again.

It sounds to me that you live in a wonderful place.  Evidently more summer oriented than annually functional.  I am sure that you a leading the trend and will see great progress in the next few years.

We moved to NH, the state where I grew up. My sister Jane, my brother Harry live close enough to drive over for dinner.  We picked a place to live that is close to the airport, a hospital, and has a nice view of the Merrimack river.  Amanda did several months of research via the internet before we left Maryland to physically inspect this place.  We rented for two years just incase we found something that we liked better. We didn’t.

Recently, a few days ago, I realized that fitness and health do not ensure freedom from disease or a long life.  This generated an early morning sense of urgency to do only what I really want to do and not waste any of my time watching or reading fiction.  (Perhaps this is what happened to me, or I have invented a fake explanation of who I am.)

I have been rereading a Kindle book on philosophy by Mortimer J. Adler.  The reason I know that I am rereading it is that it has notes that I left so long ago that I am a completely different thinker than I was 15 years ago, (Kindle hit the market in 2007.)  I read the book now and I have to read many pages and paragraphs at least three times to understand what Adler is writing.  I felt that this rereading was a symptom of my brain surgery, i.e. stupidity.  Then I found a note, by me years ago, in the book that cited exactly the same information about rereading pages three times.  I believed the repeated reading was related to the complexity of the document.  So I now confuse normal rereading as being a symptom of my stupidity.  I am confusing intelligence with stupidity.

Amanda has confronted me many times for blaming my thoughts and actions on my brain surgery.  She assures me that I am acting effectively and normally. I should stop complaining about the quality of my thoughts and actions.

My lesson is that just because my sense of thinking and feeling is different doesn’t mean that it is worse than it used to be.  It is only different, not worse (i.e. crazier).

Completion of my Life, History

Completion of my Life, History

Can I write essays using email drafts?
Steps:
Send essay to "fvogt@mac.com”
Start writing derived from steno pad notes.

Topic is “completion of my life.” Notes are on page 20231022 Sunday.

In 1990, a few months after separation from my wife Donna, I am taking the Landmark Forum during the month of March, forget the exact date, second week end etc?

I was 35 years old, and I realized that my life was complete. I had accomplished all I wanted, needed in life. I had two children, an ex-wife (soon to be) who would take care of them.
Now at age 68 I discover that there is much more to my life that I had ever imagined. I am still growing and expanding my self. Incredible, how does this happen? I continue to discover my “road to freedom.”


Key insights:
Discovering the ideas and habits that I unconsciously carry with me and use them to drive my behavior. Following discovery making decisions about following or changing them? Can this even done, can I recall them a few days later, can I honestly change my being, am I related to and helping the people that I know? Discovery that what I think is growth is finding out that this is not due to retirement or older age. I find younger people dealing with the same or more complicated issues.

Comments on Detachment and Caroline Myss

Why People Don't Heal and How They Can: A Practical Programme for Healing Body, Mind and Spirit by Caroline Myss
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Carolyn Myss on “Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can.”

Miss Myss gets critical comments from some readers for lacking scientific evidence for her ideas. By scientific I image these folks mean randomized double blind trials with thousands of participants. Myss needs to be read in the manner of poetry or scripture, with spirit, not with mechanical reductionist formalism of the scientist. Psychology and theology are not scientific fields because their essence is dealing with human will.

A few of her words that are particular useful for me are:
Page 150, second paragraph, she says “In fact, reaching a detached state of mind for even five minutes a day is so valuable it can infuse your body with the equivalent energy of six months of living in genuine hope.” She suggests prayer or a mantra to attain detachment. [My preference is Meister Eckhart’s treatises “On Detachment.” A person does not need to believe in a god to learn from the arguments and tools of theology.]

Page 191 first paragraph, she provides a daily practice of paying attention to your energy that is facilitated by [and facilitates] detachment. [Preliminay exercises for feeling my energy are feeling, occupying my body, my feet, legs and so on up and out. Eventually, maybe months, years of practice, awareness of energy comes.]

My only criticism is that she does not discuss how truly difficult and challenging it is to hold onto detachment or energy awareness for more than a fleeting moment.

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My Notes from "Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World"

Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World by Carl T. Bergstrom
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A good review, for scientists and engineers, and probably news to the liberal arts culture (reference C. P. Snow's "The Two Cultures"), of the current use of numbers, statistics and charts to mislead readers.

The final chapter "Refuting Bullshit" is the best chapter of the book. Read this chapter first if you are in a hurry. Then fill any gaps in understanding by reviewing the previous chapters and sections as needed.

Page 232 says, "A single study doesn't tell you much about what the world is like. It has little value unless you know the rest of the literature and have a sense about how to integrate these findings with previous ones. Researchers weigh the evidence across multiple studies and try to understand why multiple studies often produce seemingly inconsistent results."

They quote Jonathan Swift, "Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it."


In chapter 9 he explains a principle called the "base rate fallacy" based on the statistical concept of "p-value."

He uses several examples, one is a suspect whose finger print matches the finger print on file with the police. The reported odds of this are one in 10 million. But the probability that the suspect is guilty requires that we know how many other peoples have the matching finger print. It turns out that in a database of 50 million, 5 other people are a match also.

Therefore the odds of the person being guilty are one in five, not one in 50 million!

When the suspect comes up with a matching finger print then the probability must evaluated agains all the others who also have a matching finger print.

He provides more examples, Lyme disease testing, testing for ESP with playing cards, why so many "proven" science results cannot be duplicated by other scientists. If you come up positive on a Lyme disease test the probability of your having Lyme disease must be based on the population of positive results. How many false positives for Lyme exist? At the time of this book, it was a surprisingly large percentage.

My take away is the the "p-value" error may be like finding theories to fit the data. About as bad as selecting data to fit the theory. For theories based on research of huge amounts of data, data can always be found to support many spurious correlations.

[Please note that they say matching finger print, distinct from the same finger print.]
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Self Awareness through Literature

Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature by Angus Fletcher
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have not read Wonderworks since May 25th, 2022. I asked myself why I was putting it off. I realized that the underlying idea that most of what we do is driven by how we feel is a little bit depressing. It is like I am a puppet on biochemical strings, endorphins, adrenaline, oxytocin, dopamine. On the other hand I have enhanced awareness of how my body feels and how it is affected by my thoughts, food, and exercise. Intellectually I have known about this for a long time, but I am becoming aware of it at a deeper, more direct level than before.

For years I have puzzled over the difference between awareness, attention and knowing. In summary, awareness is direct perception of what is happening in my body. It is wordless, knowledge that does not come through ideas or perception. I found this discussion and distinction in Mortimer Adler’s theory of language presented in his small book “Some Questions about Language” page 99 in chapter 4, question number six. I found that going to any one section of this book and trying to read it for a quick answer to my questions is incomprehensible without first studying the intellectual scaffold of all the preceding pages. I had to be very patient to get to page 99 and I found that I could not read this book in anything but short doses each day. Almost as difficult as studying my mathematics books.

So back to Wonderworks, I immediately see that what I get from books I also get from my own thoughts and memories. In a sense every thought or memory is a potential story and produces its own feeling in me. I was surprised to recognize that the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is to find thoughts and possibilities that inspire me to get up and get things done, until this new awareness I just thought it was a result of habit and my good character, ;).

What it really is, is using my imagination to manage my body chemistry to excite myself into action. What a great tool that I didn’t even know I was using automatically. If anyone had asked me prior to starting to read Wonderworks, I would have said that I can call on my imagination to manage my feelings, but I don’t do it except on rare occasions when I feel in need of a little extra grit or happiness. Now I see it happens all the time, I am a continuous flow of feelings driven by my behavior and diet. But I am more than this in a way that I can’t yet describe yet.

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