Stories podcast

#Audio Drama #France #francisrosenfeld

1:03:38

Too many entrepreneurs get stuck on the business treadmill, hustling nonstop, unable to scale, and unknowingly stalling their growth. That’s where Dave Ramsey began. After crashing into $3 million in debt, he rebuilt from scratch, turning a small radio program into a national show with millions of listeners. With over three decades of experience in entrepreneurship, business growth, and content creation, he knows what it takes to build a lasting business. In this episode, Dave reveals the six drivers of long-term success, the five key stages of startup growth, and how he balances life as an entrepreneur and a content creator. In this episode, Hala and Dave will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (00:23) The Core Principles of Financial Freedom (05:42) Adapting to Change as a Content Creator (09:22) Balancing Content Creation and Entrepreneurship (12:34) How to Create a Clear Path in Business (15:19) The Truth About Starting a Business Today (18:22) The Six Drivers of Business Success (26:20) Shifting From Tactical to Strategic Thinking (29:44) The Five Stages of Business Growth (41:10) Leading with Care, Clarity, and Accountability (47:10) Identifying the Right Leadership Skills (48:35) Starting a Media Business as an Entrepreneur Dave Ramsey is a personal finance expert, radio personality, bestselling author, and the founder and CEO of Ramsey Solutions. Over the past three decades, he has built a legacy of helping millions achieve financial freedom. As the host of The Ramsey Show , Dave reaches more than 18 million listeners each week. He is the author of eight national bestselling books. His latest, Build a Business You Love , helps entrepreneurs navigate growth and overcome challenges at every stage. Sponsored By: Shopify - Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at youngandprofiting.co/shopify OpenPhone: Streamline and scale your customer communications with OpenPhone. Get 20% off your first 6 months at openphone.com/profiting Airbnb - Find yourself a co-host at airbnb.com/host Indeed - Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/profiting RobinHood - Receive your 3% boost on annual IRA contributions, sign up at robinhood.com/gold Factor - Get 50% off your first box plus free shipping at factormeals.com/factorpodcast Rakuten - Save while shopping at rakuten.com Microsoft Teams - Stop paying for tools. Get everything you need, for free at aka.ms/profiting LinkedIn Marketing Solutions - Get a $100 credit on your next campaign at linkedin.com/profiting Resources Mentioned: Dave’s Book, Build a Business You Love: bit.ly/BuildaBusinessYouLove Dave’s Website: ramseysolutions.com Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap Youtube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Podcast, Business, Business Podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal Development, Starting a Business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side Hustle, Mental Health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth Mindset, Side Hustle, Passive Income, Online Business, Solopreneur, Networking.…

Stories

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Fiction

159 episodes

Stories

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updated il y a environ 7 jours

maison des série•Feed

Fiction

159 episodes

#Audio Drama #France #francisrosenfeld

Tous les épisodes

1
The Gates of Horn and Ivory - Chapter 5.1 Thesmophoria I 9:25

il y a environ 7 jours9:25

9:25

“Have you prepared yourself, daughter? You have to set an example for all the married women: fast for nine days, refrain from the pleasures of the flesh and purify yourself to be worthy of the Goddess’s blessing.” “Yes, mother. Although I find it a bit ironic that I need to prepare myself so I’d be worthy of my own blessing.” “You are a role model, daughter. Everyone is looking to you for guidance. Among the Attic women, you should be the strictest follower of the ritual preparations.” ‘Shouldn’t be that hard,’ Persephone thought. ‘We only eat ambrosia, and I haven’t even seen my beloved in months. What is ambrosia made from, anyway? I hope it’s a proper lenten meal.’ “Have you chosen your pig, dear?” Demeter asked innocently, reminding her daughter of the unavoidable and loathsome drudgery of sacrificing some poor creature, which seemed to be mandatory for every celebration, be it of joy or of mourning. “Why don’t you choose one for me, mother?” She smiled back, waiting for a snarky retort, but her mother was in a good mood, so she took her daughter’s bratty comment in stride. “I wouldn’t dream of making choices for you. You’re a grown woman, mistress of your own fate. Just make sure to pick a fat one this time. The ladies seem to believe it makes a difference in the abundance of next year’s harvest.”…

1
The Gates of Horn and Ivory - Chapter 4.2 Kore 8:51

il y a environ 14 jours8:51

8:51

“Mother, aren’t we going the wrong way?” she asked Demeter when the ship left the shore and started following the sun due west instead of sailing towards the sunrise. Demeter smiled, but said nothing. “Where are we going?” “Sicily.” “Why?” “You’ll see, the latter smiled in anticipation.” Anthesphoria was a festival of flowers, and as such, dedicated to Persephone, or, more precisely, to her incarnation as the maiden, Kore. The mind creates sophisticated models to get a grip on reality, abstract structures which are often personified to make it easier for it to relate to them. These models may not make sense rationally, they are archetypal, and are useful in interpreting the world in the absence of knowledge. They build stories to explain the unseen patterns of nature, which are experienced, but not understood. The archetype of the Goddess kept shifting, depending on its symbolic meaning.…

1
The Gates of Horn and Ivory - Chapter 4.1 A Trip to Magna Grecia 9:28

il y a environ 21 jours9:28

9:28

The delegation left early in the morning, poised to reach the shores of Magna Graecia at sunrise. Everywhere else Persephone was just another goddess of the Pantheon, but in Locri, she was the goddess. Two majestic temples were raised for her worship, and the city had bestowed upon her the additional honor of being the protector of childbirth, thus managing to intrude upon the attributions of both Hera and Artemis, and therefore offend them both. Persephone tried to suppress a smile, and figured out if any of the lands of Hellas were going to have the gumption to question the gods, they had to be Locri. The city had been founded by the Achaeans and was protected by Poseidon; its citizens were aristocratic and never backed down from a fight. Their sophisticated, unbendable laws, and their appreciation for athletics, culture and the arts, were supported by the enviable wealth of their thriving commerce. The women of Locri were very special to Persephone, who favored them as much as they did her. They were independent and powerful, undaunted by their men’s ambitions, and they didn’t indulge the whims and demands of the latter. They were masters and administrators of their own homes and wealth, acting like earthly goddesses in their own right, and so they didn’t aspire to gain the favor of Aphrodite, and her enchanted binds of desire, or Hera, the ideal obedient wife, or either one of the virgin goddesses, who had to forgo marriage in order to enjoy their freedom.…

1
Chapter 3.3 - Summer Festivals 9:51

il y a environ 28 jours9:51

9:51

“Welcome back, daughter,” her mother greeted her, all smiles, at the mouth of the cave. Persephone felt a little stiff from sleeping on the ground and still a little turned around after traveling back and forth twice between worlds within the boundaries of one night. “I take it you had a pleasant journey home,” Demeter continued, way too cheerful so early in the morning. “How is your husband?” “He’s well, thank you,” Persephone mumbled, squinting from the crude light. “I take it your followers are still looking for you,” her mother pointed to the group, which meandered through the forest and valleys carrying torches in the middle of the day. “I wouldn’t deprive them of the excitement of finding me, eventually. Let’s give them a few hours. I have a few things to tend to in the meantime.” “Your husband gave you homework, dear?” “No. It’s a favor I promised a friend. In fact, I was wondering if you’d be able to help. It’s a plant.” “For Proteus.” When you spend so much time switching between realities, whether it’s from death to life or from sleep to consciousness, you are bound to cross paths with the shapeshifting god of the unconscious, whose gift of prophecy and ability to alter the properties of matter were unmatched, even among the gods.…

1
Chapter 3.2 - The Eleusinian Mysteries 9:09

il y a 5 weeks9:09

9:09

The communicants started their descent into the depths of the earth, with nothing to light their way other than the high priestess’s torch. The latter was tall, and her pallid members stood in stark contrast with her long hair, black as night, which flowed freely and draped around her shoulders like a mantle, and the black chiton, tied around her waist three times with a thin golden girdle. She wore a tri-faced mask, which wrapped around her head, hiding her identity, and on her temples, the silver horns of the crescent moon: the symbol of Hecate. As they continued their descent, the trail became narrower, sweeping between large boulders, overgrown with tree roots in places, its quietude disrupted by the sounds of an underground river flowing nearby. The supplicants’ faces looked carved in stone, they all look the same, as if their spirits have left them. They seemed unaware of each other’s presence, their fixated stare darting into the darkness before them, as if something powerful inside it pulled them into its unknown depths, a ghostly army of the dead whose footsteps were muffled by the soft silt on the path. All of them had partaken in the ceremonial drink, a hot wine mixed with herbs and spices which felt like liquid fire running through their blood, a paradoxically still fire, bringing peace beyond understanding. Their spirits turned inward, leaving their earthly shells vacant and making them look as if they were sleepwalking down the path.…

1
Chapter 2.3 - The Moirae 10:27

il y a 6 weeks10:27

10:27

The world is surface, a shimmery veil of illusion, woven from gossamer and dreams by the Moirae to give the unbound consciousness a home. Behind this elusive veil, the fundamental action principles of existence, known only to the gods, continuously transform reality, sometimes unseen, sometimes picking at its back and putting waves through its diaphanous fabric. Its visible side glistens like a mirror, reflecting any consciousness that is there to see it, its ever changing imagery shifting to harmonize with it, an exquisite mirage, poised to fool the senses. It looks solid and permanent enough, but it’s not, and if you touch it, it shrivels under your fingers like a mimosa plant, contracting into itself and letting you hold on to thin air. Reality is made of nothing, just like dreams; it comes from nothing and has to return to it eventually, it just does it so much slower than the latter.…

1
The Gates of Horn and Ivory - Chapter 3.1 The Dionysia 7:50

il y a 7 weeks7:50

7:50

Persephone used the pretext she had to oversee the progress in the barley fields to take her leave from the city, which was bursting at the seams with crafting festival paraphernalia, cooking, and the stress people always experience on the eve of major holidays. The city’s noise and bustle gradually disappeared as the goddess ventured into the fields, which had already been plowed and sown, and whose fresh shoots were starting to emerge, green and slender like grass. The clearings and meadows overflowed with daffodils, and though the air was still cool, Persephone felt Gaia’s vibrant return to life. The honeybees, her underworld messengers, emerged from crevices and hollows, to greet their mistress with the latest news from home. She watched them dance their messages, smiling to old memories, intoxicated with the scent of daffodils and caressing the tiny shoots of wheat as if they were her little children, gathered round to bask in her presence. Such blessed peace she felt in the fields, whose bounty filled her heart more than any offerings left on the steps of her altars.…

1
The Gates of Horn and Ivory - Chapter 2.3 The Moirae 10:27

il y a 8 weeks10:27

10:27

1
The Gates of Horn and Ivory - 2.2 Charming Dionysus 10:44

il y a 9 weeks10:44

10:44

“Good morning, princess!” Dionysus entered the room, surrounded, as always, by a large posse of obviously impaired maenads and satyrs. He never went anywhere without them, and sometimes Persephone wondered if he’d ever been alone. Huge Etruscan amphorae filled with wine had been brought to the room for his visit, a welcome escape from the white on white decor, even though the god himself barely partook, since he drank nectar like the rest of them, to restore his beauty and youth. Persephone admired his graceful demeanor as he approached her, a vaguely androgynous countenance, with long flowing hair, braided with wild vines, a beautiful figure who looked deceptively young, his gait as light and carefree as the spirit which shone, childlike, in his eyes. He smiled at the goddess, who was close kin, and with whom he shared the gift of walking between worlds. ‘How did he keep so fit?’ Persephone couldn’t help but be amazed, ‘when he was constantly engaged in this self-indulgent lifestyle!’ It obviously took its toll on his entourage, the satyrs who, she assumed, had never experienced sobriety, and the maenads who roamed the forests drunk and out of control, acquiring the strength and ferocity of wild beasts from the substances they consumed.…

1
The Gates of Horn and Ivory - 2.1 The Healings of Epidaurus 10:05

il y a 10 weeks10:05

10:05

It was almost midnight when the goddesses and their suite reached the temple, where they were welcomed in complete silence by the priests, who took them to the Thollos and retreated respectfully, content with the privilege of watching the ceremony. Persephone parted the veil between worlds, allowing the denizens of her kingdom safe passage to the land of the living. “Merry meet, Asclepius,” she welcomed the famed doctor with a smile. “I carry glad tidings from your husband, mistress, and all his love. I will be happy to return and reassure him you are well.” “What dreams you bring, my friend? Will the afflicted receive welcome news?” “I bring healing for some, and comfort for others, and news from the ones they have loved in this world. The portal between worlds is open and we await your command, my queen.” With that, he bowed deeply and moved to her side, to control the flow of healing dreams to the patients, who were fast asleep, curled up on the stone floors of the temple. “Who is coming forth to seek guidance?” She uttered the first words of the ritual. “It’s Attalus, goddess, son of Cassander.” “And what is your need?” The sleeping soul gave her the full measure of his ailments, while Asclepius listened keenly, occasionally nodding. When the patient was done talking, the doctor thought deeply, then scribbled a recipe for medicine in light, on a parchment made of air, and handed it to the sleeping soul, to remember upon awakening.…

1
The Gates of Horn and Ivory - 1.3 The Haunted Caves 10:18

il y a 11 weeks10:18

10:18

They saw it from afar, as they were traveling among the clouds in Helios’s chariot, the strange city of caves, carved in the soapstone of a cluster of spiky cliffs, sometimes by nature, sometimes by man, displayed amid the arid landscape like a giant sculpture, maybe an artifact the titans left behind, before his love of humankind landed Prometheus his penance. A huge human beehive it seemed to be, where the diligent workers moved about through hundreds of holes in the stone cliffs towards the innards of the place, dug deep into the earth: the huge underground metropolis that marked the beating heart of Anatolia. A large delegation welcomed the goddesses, with the traditional sheaves of grain and prolonged orations, and when it was done prostrating, the group surrounded them like living water and carried them down stairs and ramps through large subterranean chambers and hallways, past people carrying on their mundane activities, past carved galleries and alleys and arcades, public spaces and ventilation shafts, temples, tombs, and sanitation systems, stables and wells and water reservoirs, all the parts of a flawlessly functioning city, miles beneath the earth’s surface, illuminated only by Prometheus’s gift.…

1
The Gates of Horn and Ivory - 1.2 Praise Olympus! 10:00

il y a 12 weeks10:00

10:00

The sun woke her up the next morning, the memory of her dream still fresh. She was picnicking in her orchard, eating pomegranate seeds at dusk, while Hades, who sat beside her, watching, brought each seed to life with a light of its own as her lips touched it, just to amuse her. A group of nymphs burst into the room, giggling and shoving each other, and suddenly grew quiet when they found themselves in the presence of the goddess. A prolonged monotonous droning of odes and praise ensued, a spectacle Persephone listened to with patience and appreciation, like a good immortal would, secretly relieved when it finally ended and it was proper for her to get out of bed. The darn thing was massive, placed atop of a stepped marble platform to loom over the also enormous room, which would have been a better fit for a ballroom than a bedroom, and whose glistening white portico opened out to the sights above the clouds. Far into the distance, the peak of Mount Olympus poked through them, a vision in rose and lavender, halfway between dream and reality.…

1
The Gates of Horn and Ivory - 1.1 Spring 9:55

il y a 14 weeks9:55

9:55

Persephone had a secret, one she could never tell her mother. She had never enjoyed the gossip, the pointless aggravation, and the churning of vanities and ambitions that surrounded her life in the living world, the daily rehashed dramas of the nymphs’ latest trysts, the self-centered empty dalliances of the male gods, the petty envies of the spurned minor goddesses, the closed-minded expectations of the powers that be, the gaudy, useless pomp, the empty rhetoric. When tall, dark, and handsome walked her way, she had rolled her eyes at first, in exasperation of having to endure yet another episode of the over-inflated male ego, and was determined to evade his attention as soon as feasible and with as little damage to her eardrums as possible, but he turned out to be nothing she expected. He didn’t tell her who he was, of course, out of fear he’d be rejected before he had a chance to speak his woo, and by the time they got closer, he had even more reason to keep his identity quiet, grateful for the miracle of her and worried not to lose her love.…

1
The Blue Rose Manuscript - Rose 4:35

il y a 15 weeks4:35

4:35

Rose Brecht had an enchanted childhood, rendered even more so because she’d been born blessed with a vivid imagination. Her mind made up worlds and stories, so complex and filled with detail that even the grown-ups had trouble telling them apart from reality some times. Though they got her in trouble more often than she liked to admit, these worlds inside her mind felt very real to her, even though she couldn’t share them with anybody, not without being scolded. Throughout her childhood this imaginary world shared the landscape of her mind with the real one, and she allocated equal importance to the two to the dismay of her family and friends. When time came for her to go to college, she shocked her loved ones by choosing a discipline deeply grounded in science, replete with experiments, fact finding and extensive research, a choice they had difficulty believing at first, used as they were to her wild flights of fancy.…

1
The Blue Rose Manuscript - Only Echoes, Endlessly Repeating - Local 11:10

il y a 16 weeks11:10

11:10

Local: Denoting a variable or other entity that is only available for use in one part of a construct, relating to a particular region or part, or to each of any number of these. My beloved child, there are so many things I wanted to teach you! We all live in a subset of reality that only reaches as far as our minds and our senses. We occupy a small room inside being, and in that room we’re like the orange that falls off the side of a wagon and upsets every other fruit in its path. We get a sense of our surroundings based on immediacy and adjacency; we rush to the familiar to solve problems and favor the most recent things we did when we look for quick ways to tackle something new. Our minds economize when they take in the world, we keep our trusted standards to the forefront of our thinking, so we don’t have to do any more of it than necessary. We can only experience things that are available in our corner of the world. Just because something does not exist where we are, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist in general. Here is a simple example, we only know what snow looks like because we live here, where it gets cold in the winter. If we lived in Egypt, we could go through our entire lives with no knowledge of it. Everything that hasn’t dawned on us yet does not exist. There may be states of being stranger than words, time crystals, solar winds, condensates of reality itself, but they are all unavailable to our perception, because we can’t live inside the conditions that define their worlds.…

Stories

1
The Blue Rose Manuscript - Only Echoes Endlessly Repeating - Fractal 12:59

il y a 17 weeks12:59

12:59

Fractal: A complex geometric pattern exhibiting self-similarity in that small details of its structure viewed at any scale repeat elements of the overall pattern. [This observation is unrelated to the manuscript, but it refers to an event so unusual for the climate of this region I thought it would be worth recording. Today, July 24, at four in the afternoon, it snowed. The large and very cold snowflakes signaled to us that the wind currents that made this strange weather event possible drew precipitation from the clouds in the higher atmosphere faster than they could adjust. Snow in summer is rare, but it happened before in this area, as the weather records from 1816 indicate. The snowflakes melted quickly, because of the heat embodied in the earth, but not before we had a chance to immortalize their delicate array of intricate shapes, no two alike. Because this event was as short lived as it was unexpected, it didn’t affect the library grounds, which have been a haven for many rare species of historical plants for the last two centuries. All the vegetation, from mosses to succulents and from herbaceous perennials to trees shrugged off the late chill, all but the ferns, whose fiddlehead growth will probably be delayed by a month. The cool and humid weather encouraged the proliferation of snails, to the great distress of the groundskeeper and to our unexpected amusement. Their shells dazzled in a broad variety of colors, patterns and shapes, which, for some strange reason, remind me of the illuminations of the manuscript.]…

Stories

1
The Blue Rose Manuscript - Only Echoes Endlessly Repeating - Scale 12:40

il y a 18 weeks12:40

12:40

Scale: The relative size or extent of something. The first thing you should consider when you ask yourself how something works is at what scale. A grain of sand is the same as a rock or a planet, it is our specific experience that renders it minute. Our sense of proportion, rooted in our own size, makes some processes obvious and others obscure, we can only perceive things based on our own scale. Our mind has a broader view, but it too is limited. We are range bound to the things we can observe, either through our own senses or through the use of instruments. There are things in existence we can never see, not even when given all of time and when eliminating all of the limitations of space: things from before the universe began, things that wind up so tight that even time and light can’t escape them, things from places that are not reality, if they exist. The reason we don’t know the last fact for sure is that the scale of the thing we are observing, existence itself, makes it impossible for us to see outside it. We live in a flatland of perception, where things, speeds and concepts that are very large or very small do not exist. Take, for instance, our perception of time: things that move at speeds faster than of our range are invisible and things that move at speeds much slower than it we consider still. Nothing is really still, even the North Star moves.…

Stories

1
The Blue Rose Manuscript - Always and Forever - Clarity 11:21

il y a 19 weeks11:21

11:21

Clarity: The quality of transparency or purity; the quality of being coherent and intelligible. [Nowhere in the document is the fact that somebody arranged the pages out of sequence more clear than here. The writing is neat and correct, but labored, betraying a hand still striving to achieve full control of its fine motor functions. There is no doubt the scribe is the same, the markers of the handwriting clearly indicate it. Even the rose seal looks tentative, as if a child had gotten permission to use it and felt overwhelmed by the responsibility and afraid of making a mistake. This page is illuminated to a much greater degree than the others, a task made easier to accomplish due to the sparseness of the text, which is restricted to the center of the page. It looks like there have been temporary lines to demarcate a box for the content, maybe to help the young scribe maintain clean text edges; there are also lines to keep the writing straight, and the calligraphy clings to them with tormented intensity. The experience of reading the content of this document presented in the handwriting of an eight or nine-year-old is surreal. The more I advance into the manuscript, the more this question weighs on me: who was this person who wrote it down? She was a woman as far as we can tell, but there are no traces of her passing through this world, outside the conversations included in this manuscript.…

Stories

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The Blue Rose Manuscript - Always and Forever - Constant 10:53

il y a 20 weeks10:53

10:53

Constant: A number expressing a relation or property which remains the same in all circumstances, or for the same substance under the same conditions. The universe is a living contradiction, and I stopped trying to reconcile its paradoxes a long time ago, so I will state this knowing it doesn’t yield to logic. Existence is constantly in motion, endlessly transforming and renewing itself, and yet, throughout its churning essence there are fixed points, constants, fundamental invariants. They are not fixed in the sense we normally understand that word, so things appear to us to be changing, even though in a larger sense they are not. There is a fine structure of constants underlying existence, a structure that governs it discretely and throughout. For example, we can see every system in creation at a large scale, where we can measure its energy and its movement, and at a small scale, where we can define its essence. These two values, the measure of its energy and the measure of its substance, are always in the same proportion, no matter what system you are contemplating. This is not something reality makes obvious to us, from our standpoint all we see is matter, constantly decaying, recombining, bouncing into other instances of itself. We can’t see the law behind its apparent chaos, the law that says that the energy of a system and its temperature are always relating to each other in the same way. Constants like that are few, but together they are enough to define our reality, and if we were to alter even one, whatever we know of it would cease to exist. No need to worry, though, this is impossible.…

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The Blue Rose Manuscript - Always and Forever - Rapture 15:13

il y a 21 weeks15:13

15:13

Rapture: A state or experience of being carried away by overwhelming emotion. I will describe a personal experience for you, because it is the best way I can think of to illustrate the concept we’re about to discuss. I went out into nature just before dawn, during that ghostly hour that puts a chill through one’s bones no matter what the season. It is unfamiliar, that hour, a time when we’re usually asleep, and that made me uncomfortable to be out, among the shadows and the creatures of the night. There was something different about that early morning, a strange stillness, like all existence had come to a stop - no sounds in the branches, no gusts of wind, no calls. I couldn’t feel the air against my skin, it must have been at the temperature where no heat exchange takes place. The light switched gradually from violet to gray, enough that I could distinguish the things around me, and be astonished even more by their strange stillness. I sat on the ground, and I couldn’t feel the coldness of the earth beneath me, it must have been at the temperature where no heat exchange takes place. It didn’t feel like one usually expects, and you know exactly what I mean if you ever had to sleep on the ground.…

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The Blue Rose Manuscript - Divided by Zero - Revelation 14:34

il y a 22 weeks14:34

14:34

Revelation: The divine or supernatural disclosure to humans of something unexplainable relating to human existence or the world. The expectation to understand everything, while worthy, is unreasonable. Some things can’t be counted in the time frame of existence, some knowledge is so alien to our mind we can’t put it in a structure of understanding. Don’t shun such knowledge and such things. It is pure vanity to believe we have a grasp on reality just for understanding a few of its laws. Think about it. We can only understand the things close to our scale, everything that is significantly larger or smaller is outside our grasp. We can only see things that get revealed by the light, everything that is finer than the top if its range or coarser than its bottom is invisible to us. If I were to move so fast that, as you blink, I shifted my position from this side of you to the other, your mind could not find a reasonable explanation, and would think me magical. Faraway things may look real to us, when in fact they are just mirages of light. You say that the mirage phenomenon is not foreign to our understanding, and that we all heard about the strange tricks eyes play on weary travelers when they’re lost in the desert, thirsty and exhausted.…

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The Blue Rose Manuscript - Divided by Zero Shift 15:20

il y a 23 weeks15:20

15:20

Shift: A slight change in position, direction, or tendency. Let’s talk about a quality of existence which escapes the inattentive eye: its movements are not smooth, it advances in jerks and jumps, in sudden shifts, going from one state to another without passing through the stations in between. This works for gaining understanding and knowledge as well as it does for freezing a pond. Reality doesn’t advance along threads, it takes the stairs. It stays in a state for a while, no matter how much effort goes into moving it forward, and then it jumps, suddenly and for no particular reason, to the next state, which is not only a change in quality but also different in nature, so different sometimes that we can’t even recognize it as the next logical step in a progression. It is often easier to recognize the shifts. They are sudden events, out of the blue, but even when we expect them, they still take us by surprise, because we can’t figure out their timing or the fashion in which they will present themselves to us. We understand them in retrospect, clear as day, but when they move life to a new state we can’t recognize it, for the simple reason we haven’t seen it before. These shifts are sudden, but subtle, like rip currents at sea, which you only acknowledge after you’ve been caught in them.…

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The Blue Rose Manuscript - Divided by Zero - Options 15:20

il y a 24 weeks15:20

15:20

Option: An act of choosing; a thing that is or may be chosen Like all naturally evolving systems reality doesn’t behave according to a predetermined plan, it runs on repeated trial and error and on eliminating the fruitless branches in the tree of choice. Even though you can’t see it, reality presents and tests options for itself constantly and automatically, in a manner you may recognize from the quiet processes inside of a body. It favors the organisms best fit to survive; it breaks down things that are in the way of processes in progress and it keeps altering the states of its major systems until they reach a balance with each other. There is an unseen simplifier to this process, one that runs quietly in the background and one we don’t pay attention to: reality is constantly eliminating all the outcomes of a set of circumstances safe one. We don’t think about it because that would add an unnecessary amount of complexity to an already overburdened understanding of life.…

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The Blue Rose Manuscript - Mirror Reality Synapse 15:36

il y a 25 weeks15:36

15:36

Synapse: A junction between two nerve cells, consisting of a minute gap across which impulses pass by diffusion of a neurotransmitter. There is an interstitial stretch that fills the space between knowledge and learning, a field where ideas roam free. Inside that space there is no organizing structure, everything melds together in a chaotic jumble, free to create associations and break them as easily as breathing. These free moving concepts are like rapping raindrops of knowledge on the roof of your mind. There is no logic in this space between your mind and the ideas that are trying to reach it, not in the sense we usually understand it. In this space all the forms that human thought creates are equal and stripped of moral charges. It is a place where ideas move constantly at great speeds and bind in amalgams that only last fractions of a second, but in their endless morphing all these ideas are valid, at least temporarily, and they function as scaffolding in the construction of your lasting thoughts.…

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The Blue Rose Manuscript - Mirror Reality -Sympathetic 14:40

il y a 26 weeks14:40

14:40

Sympathetic: Relating to, producing, or denoting an effect which arises in response to a similar action elsewhere. Frequently actions, states and events emerge simultaneously in various parts of reality, acting exactly the same, like synchronized ripples in its fabric. Sometimes an event gets reflected by another, completely bound to it like an object to its shadow or to its mirror image. Never can these shadows and reflections act independently from the object that generated them. Unlike reflections and shadows however, these pairings of events work both ways, like they are both the objects and they are both their mirror images too. These reflections are random and inexplicable, not bound by logic or causality, they just exist randomly in the fabric of reality and pop up for no reason now and then as a reminder that we understand very few of the rules that govern existence. Imagine walking down a sumptuous hall where everything fits into the design and is in harmony with its proportions, color and style.…

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The Blue Rose Manuscript - Roots, Branches and Offshoots - Concentration 16:03

il y a 27 weeks16:03

16:03

Concentration: The relative amount of a given substance contained within a solution or in a particular volume of space; the amount of solute per unit volume of solution; the action or power of focusing one’s attention on mental work. You are familiar with concentrated essence from the flower oils and hydrosols you have sampled in the apothecary shop. Concentration eliminates the bulk of a medium to extract the essence blended inside it. Let me help you understand how you can concentrate and direct your mind so you can extract its essence in a similar way. Whether we are awake or asleep, our mind never stops churning. We buckle under the weight of our thoughts, most of which are incidental and contradictory. Like the alchemist who distills the essence of a thousand roses into a single drop of perfume, so should you be able to remove the bulk around the core of your ideas to refine their content. The theory of how to do this is simple, the practice not so much. The mind is like a scared little rabbit, constantly on the run, alert to the slightest noise, disturbed by the faintest memory. It never stops building defenses around itself and consumes enormous amounts of resources in the process.…

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The Blue Rose Manuscript - Roots, Branches and Offshoots - Derivative 14:59

il y a 28 weeks14:59

14:59

Derivative: An expression representing the rate of change of a function with respect to an independent variable. Some phenomena are not about themselves. They take you one level, one dimension down into the substance of things, they are measurements of change, gauges of the inner workings of the world, consequences of movement. Every atom in existence is a player in a giant set of games of variability. Imagine the collection of all of these games as threads, clusters, and fabrics. These threads of things happening, let’s say, are not even, they display changes in speed; they have lumps and thinnings; they stop and change direction, they soar, plummet or disappear. Their changes imprint a secondary metric into our world, a measure of variability, a smoothing over of its irregular nature. These measures show trends and directions, they clean the world of detail to reveal only the impulses of motion. They are diagrams of change. Take, for instance, the line of highest slope. The water always follows it when it flows down the hill. Or the line of lowest slope. A donkey will always find it when it carries burdens up the hill. These lines are not obvious, they are abstract measurements of the change in incline and they only become visible when the water, or the donkey, reveals their existence. You will say to yourself that it is not reasonable to guide yourself by the wisdom of lesser things, and that is a vanity of human thought, which deems itself the arbiter of things only because it gathered a few droplets from an infinite sea of knowledge constantly refreshing itself.…

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The Blue Rose Manuscript - Roots, Branches and Offshoots - Precursor 15:47

il y a 29 weeks15:47

15:47

Precursor: A substance from which another is formed, especially by metabolic reaction You can think of precursors as the ancestors of an event. Everything that is has evolved from something else, which also evolved from something else. The universe is a giant chain reaction still in progress. What you are looking at right now is a step in a very complicated sequence of transformations that started at the beginning of time. I am not talking only about matter itself, which is a good example, but about everything: events, concepts, physical laws. Every happenstance is born from the interaction of a series of factors, its precursors. Change one of those factors and its structure becomes fundamentally different. Good students of the laws that govern existence don’t limit themselves to observing these interactions, they understand and anticipate the results of the reaction, and, if possible, they seek the elements which, mixed, will yield the results they desire. These elements can be anything: the right timing, a certain level of need or curiosity, spreading the word, the right state of mind. Everything is a reactant in your alchemical cauldron, the world itself is your laboratory.…

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The Blue Rose Manuscript - In Motion Current 15:56

il y a 30 weeks15:56

15:56

Current: A fluid motion in a definite direction, especially through a surrounding body of fluid in which there is less movement We all see the world as a collection of solid objects independent of each other and relying on external impulses to set them in motion. I would like you to set aside that view for the duration of this lecture, and imagine existence as a self-activating fluid. Underneath the surface of this endless sea that is reality, a sea with deep, perpetually troubled waters, there are currents and eddies and vortexes. They manifest in every one of its components, there are currents in social mores, which we call zeitgeist, there are currents in thought, which we call schools, there are currents in spiritual life, which we call religions. Under normal circumstances we accept these currents without thinking, just as we don’t wonder why blood is running through our veins, but once they draw our attention, they become impossible to ignore, so much that they can be distracting.…

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The Blue Rose Manuscript - In Motion - Timing 14:14

il y a 31 weeks14:14

14:14

Timing: The choice, judgment, or control of when something should be done. Don’t mistake timing for scheduling, or planning. It is difficult to explain what timing is, some things are easier to demonstrate than to describe. You have already encountered timing, and you take it for granted, because it is woven into the fabric of reality and occurs naturally in all the processes that work well. Its most obvious use is in music, which would not come together without tempos, measures, and counterpoints. Their planned pauses build anticipation and lead to the moment when one expects to hear the sound. We accomplish a lot of this instinctively, of course, but the fact that everybody understands the purpose of those rhythms reveals that timing is built into our being, very much like our senses are. Timing is the mental sense that helps us both create and pay attention to synchronicity, and it organizes the timeline of an event in the same way placement cards predetermine the seating of guests at a dinner table.…

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The Blue Rose Manuscript - The Round World - Folding 14:18

il y a 32 weeks14:18

14:18

Folding: Bending (something flexible and relatively flat) over on itself so that one part of it covers another. Today we will talk about folds. The purpose of folding is to minimize the surface of a thin flat object for better storage or transportation. Just like a tablecloth, all things that get folded will display distinguishable characteristics: grooves, lack of wear, wrinkles. We fold memories in our minds for many reasons, to free up space, to obscure things we don’t need all the time, to conceal unpleasant memories. We wrap this knowledge with great care, mark it with the contents, minimize its conscious footprint to just that marker so we can retrieve it at will, and submerge the rest of the packet into long-term storage, deep beneath our thoughts. There is an entire world of these mental artifacts under there, all labeled, a strange collection of treasure and garbage. Every now and then we accidentally stumble upon one of these labels and the respective fold suddenly unfurls, spilling its guts into its surroundings and disrupting current activities.…

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The Blue Rose Manuscript - The Round World - Cycles 15:01

il y a 33 weeks15:01

15:01

Cycles: Series of events that are regularly repeated in the same order. Existence runs in cycles. Some of them, like the seasons, the water cycle or the tides, are obvious, others, like the mechanisms of life, or the rise and fall of empires are not. Every quiet and settled system displays a natural tendency to suddenly and inexplicably generate unrest after a while. This happens because existence is motion, stillness means death to our universe. Anyway, about the cycles. If you watch a phenomenon long enough, you notice that it starts displaying repetitive patterns, a fact that shows in all the workings of life. Some of these repeating patterns take too long to yield useful information, but if your life span allows you to observe a phenomenon enough times, you can perfect your response to it and better your odds of success in tackling its challenges. Training a skill, weather prognostication, sailing by the stars, these are all examples of using recognizable repetitions as instruments that allow you to engage in conscious interaction with events instead of randomly reacting to them. Your ability to read cycles is a tool, just like the quill you write with is a tool.…

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The Blue Rose Manuscript - The Round World - Layer 14:51

il y a 34 weeks14:51

14:51

Layer: A sheet, quantity or thickness of material, typically one of several, covering a surface or a body Life is the sum of an almost infinite number of layers that sort out your thoughts, feelings and activities. This creates a lot of confusion as life’s level of complexity increases. You can usually focus on one or two layers at a time, the ones that come to prominence because of current events, temporary priorities or invisible puzzle pieces coming into play, but never forget that all the layers of your life are always there, and just like in a set of plans, making changes on one layer has consequences in all the others. I know, I know, after a while this living layer set gets so complicated you’ll want to throw it away and start over with a blank sheet. Rejoice! This means you’re finally doing something worthwhile. All the things that matter, all the things that are consequential in the long run are always complicated. The really consequential ones are usually too complicated to tackle alone. #storytelling #audiobooks…

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The Blue Rose Manuscript The Round World - Megapuzzle 15:01

il y a 35 weeks15:01

15:01

Megapuzzle: A life-sized construct (game, toy, or problem), designed to test ingenuity or knowledge To start your instruction, what is life? Life is a giant puzzle made of pieces you can see and pieces you can’t see, and the more pieces you can fit together, the better your understanding of life and the more you can do. The mistake most people make is trying to solve the puzzle only with the pieces they can see, no wonder nobody ever figures things out. When architects design a building, they draw plans. Flat sheets of paper on which they describe what you can see at a certain level. Nobody in their right mind would try to make a building out of floor plans, like a finger thin stack of pancakes smothering each other. It is implied that things happen between those levels, things that are not described in the plans.…

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The Blue Rose Manuscript - Foreword 4:48

il y a 36 weeks4:48

4:48

Beloved, I don’t know when these teachings will reach you, but reach you they will, in their good time, such are the rules of this round world. One thing I know, I’ll be long gone and many centuries will pass before you are born, you, my star, my destiny, my wonder. I have so many things to teach you and wish I could be there with you, but it doesn’t really matter, we’re all immortal, our kind, we never leave, we never die, we stay behind the ebbs and flows of the world to keep watch, to guide and to listen. I was born before the rise of the cathedrals, before the monuments of Egypt, before the age of reason. I was born many times, in many forms, although I’m sentimental and often return to a variation of my current one, and I will be born again some day, many centuries from now, as you. It is to you that I write this letter, my guidance for your life, filled with undying love and all the wisdom I accumulated over my many lives of learning.…

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My Dear Fiona - Epilogue 2:43

il y a 37 weeks2:43

2:43

There is nothing strange about me, and I can't explain why I can sense people from centuries past talk to me in my sleep and in my waking state. We are born with all sorts of abilities, I suppose, and I wouldn't have known mine was weird if it weren't for other people telling me so. We use our unlikely gifts the best way we know how, the best way they fit in the normal fabric of reality, which they often do not, and since I'm talking to people long dead anyway, I became an anthropologist. It is a solitary journey during which you're always surrounded by a crowd, always submerged in its beliefs and convictions, to the point where they drown you out. People who even entertain the thought mediumship may be possible, and who don't drop me immediately in the crazy or deluded category, often ask, what is the point of speaking to the dead? What is the point of speaking to anyone, really?…

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My Dear Fiona - Chapter 33 Sailing in Winter 11:18

il y a 38 weeks11:18

11:18

Have you ever drifted into an experience so foreign you lack the means to communicate it and all the rules you relied upon to guide your life become useless? My sister and I ventured into the boreal night again, only this time it wasn’t dark. In the absence of light pollution, the sky burst open to reveal a profusion of stars, clustered tight along the bright path of the Milky Way. The night was a lot colder than we had gotten used to. The ocean air carries a lot of moisture to the islands, which traps warm air under its cloud cover, but tonight there were no clouds, and the sky was full of stars, which felt close enough to touch, and looked so brilliant. We can no longer imagine a sky so bright with stars that even on a dark moon it illuminates the earth enough to see its every detail, cast in cool hues. I looked at Denise and almost didn’t recognize her: she had a light blue halo in her hair, and her demeanor was so serious it made her look wise beyond her years.…

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On Authorship 2:03

il y a 38 weeks2:03

2:03

While listening to a lecture on postmodernism and influence, a sudden recognition stunned me. Of course there are no new stories! Of course everything we think, regardless of our erudition or awareness, has been thought many times before! We all wade blindfolded through the endless pool of knowledge that is the collective unconscious, fishing out random revelations. The human brain is not sophisticated enough to fathom the structure of this giant repository, but that structure must exist, as it is fitting for something this complex. Its organization is discrete and too close to be perceived as a whole, but acts with the cohesiveness of waves or prevailing winds.…

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River of Thought 6:01

il y a 38 weeks6:01

6:01

Sometimes the river of thought flows through rapids, smothering the new born consciousness with the many faces of reality, so rich and thick with meaning you don’t even know if they’re yours, if they even relate to you, if they even exist, whether existence is something tangible, something whose presence you can guarantee tomorrow in this ever shifting unfolding of meaning that surrounds us. I am confounded and awed, and somewhat eager to alter its course to reach the lazy river made of sunshine and cozy afternoons where time slows down enough to give us comfort, where reality feels solid again, as if it had never changed. So many thoughts, so many people, conflicting interests intruding upon my life, I don’t even know you, go away! Who are you? Something inside my consciousness asks, and I can’t be sure it’s me, if there is such a thing.…

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My Dear Fiona - Chapter 32 Northern Lights 7:55

il y a 39 weeks7:55

7:55

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My Dear Fiona - Chapter 31 Winter Solstice at Maeshowe 8:03

il y a 40 weeks8:03

8:03

I always thought my life would be like the novels I liked to read when I was a teenager, where the heroine’s life was a constantly unfolding drama, replete with emotionally charged moments and anchored in the importance of her actions, where every meaningful event was anticipated well in advance and everything turned out more or less as planned. Finding you was supposed to be a glorious professional moment, and I daydreamed of basking in the glory of compliments and approval, and savoring the pith of a prestigious career which would be undeniably earned. And then I found you. There is nothing more disorienting than a dream come true: all your struggles, your planning, your entire focus, is thus brought to its end. Nobody thinks through what they want to do with that fulfilled dream, because unconsciously we don’t believe it would happen. It never looks like you planned. It feels so alien from your cherished vision you can barely recognize it and it changes you, in ways opposite from what you’d expect. It opens you to the sudden revelation you do not know what you’re doing, and you didn’t when you were sure of your goals either, and the terrifying clarity that life is not what you thought.…

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My Dear Fiona - Chapter 30 The Gray Gull 7:33

il y a 41 weeks7:33

7:33

There is an entire obscure half to life, one we avoid, forget, overlook. You can’t overlook it in the northern realms, not during winter, when the nights are long, and where people sought refuge underground to escape the harshness of the weather for centuries. The dark half of the year, finding refuge in the earth, embracing stillness, these customs have been abandoned a long time ago, and because they became unfamiliar, they make us apprehensive. There is power in this dark half we avoid; it has its own laws, its creations, its wealth of stories told by the fire during the months when there is nothing to do other than cozy up and wait for the sun to return. The dark is the keeper of stories, songs, and magic. It is the place and time for contemplation and refining thought. It affords freedom from distraction and a cocoon inside which one can turn one’s gaze inwards. Magic and mystery thrive in the dark half of life, because the latter is endlessly patient, focused and unswayed. Refined thought requires silence and solitude, while wisdom is gained away from distractions.…

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My Dear Fiona - Chapter 29 Telling Tall Tales 9:08

il y a 42 weeks9:08

9:08

Night falls quickly in Orkney at the end of October, and we drove quietly past the lochs and the stones to reach the Storytelling Centre, braving a bone chilling rain that promised to turn into ice soon. We advanced through the darkness in silence, lulled by the rhythmic motion of the windshield wipers, like the last two people on earth, who reached the limits of their familiar realm and dared to venture into uncharted territory. After a while we lost track of time and distance, immersed in an inky darkness whose substance was uniform, unmeasurable, and thicker than molasses, and which closed behind us as we passed through it, like the depths of the sea. The passing of time is a measure of change, and it does not apply to a medium that stays the same, which shows no sign of differentiation or movement. In the blackness of that night we were outside of time itself, traveling to another dimension maybe, I couldn’t tell.…

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My Dear Fiona - Chapter 28 The Ghost of Fiona Corrigall 8:34

il y a 43 weeks8:34

8:34

The sunshine was warm and hazy at the equinox, brushing the grassy knolls and the tops of the stones and sparkling on the lochs. I know you’ve been here so many times, Fiona, that’s probably why I can’t keep away from this place, and here I am again, at the Stones of Stenness, waiting for the equinox like I’m expecting something to happen. Spend enough time at sacred sites and you start believing in their magic. There is a still power in the stones, subtle, like tides, which quietly overtakes you before you take notice, and you find yourself immersed in it, dazzled and bowing to its authority. You came here at sunrise, with Jorunn, carrying baskets of honey cakes and root vegetables, hoping to entreat the spirit of Orkney and appease the wrath of Gore Vellye, whose fury strips the land bare and disappears whole islands. It’s cold already, and you are walking against the wind, wrapping the warm furs tight around your body to keep out the chill. Jorunn walks behind you, respectful, and it takes a moment for me to understand when did this role reversal happened, and then I see the signet ring on your finger, your symbol of authority. You are no longer a person, Fiona; you are the seat of power, a keeper of the royal blood your mentor took an oath to honor and defend with her life.…

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My Dear Fiona - Chapter 27 Riding a Horse of Fire 8:10

il y a 44 weeks8:10