Day 73
24 August 2022
7 minutes of QL/ME Custom
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Day 75
25 August 2022
Subliminal Break Day
Interesting stuff about Warren Buffett from an interview with Alice Schroeder, who was Warren Buffett’s official biographer
Well, first, it is that (Buffett) enjoys teaching and, second, that he has worked hard at learning communication skills and specifically learning to communicate as a teacher. So, he knows how to order material, how to tell stories, he knows how people process information. It’s also, I think, a valuable insight that teaching is one of his preferred modes of talking to people much of the time. You could almost call it his default mode. And that the value, influence, and trust he built by being such a memorable teacher of investing, business, and life in his public communications was, from a relatively early period, a very important ingredient for his tangible business success. This began as early as high school but was crucial to running the Buffett partnerships and later Berkshire Hathaway. I think this point is actually still quite underappreciated among even his most obsessive followers.
(Buffett) uses very short parables, stories, and analogies. He chooses key words that resonate with people that will stick in their heads, like Aesop’s fables, and fairy-tale imagery. He’s good at conjuring up pictures in people’s minds that trigger archetypal thinking. It enables him to make a point very quickly without having to expend a lot of verbiage.
-(Buffett’s) extremely witty. He can knock out a one-liner every few seconds. One of the nicer aspects of being around him is the easy humour of the conversations. I tried to include as many quotes as I could in The Snowball so that readers could get a sense of what a terrific conversationalist he is. When Michael Lewis reviewed The Snowball in The New Republic magazine, his conclusion from reading these quotes was that “Buffett is incapable of being dull” which is so true.
Classic investments he expends a lot of energy checking out details and ferreting out nuggets of information, way beyond the balance sheet. He would go back and look at the company’s history in depth for decades. He used to pay people to attend shareholder meetings and ask questions for him. He checked out the personal lives of people who ran companies he invested in. He wanted to know about their financial status, their personal habits, what motivated them. He behaves like an investigative journalist. All this stuff about flipping through Moody’s Manual’s picking stocks … it was a screen for him, but he didn’t stop there.
His knowledge of business history, politics, and macroeconomics is both encyclopaedic and detailed, which informs everything he does. If candy sales are up in a particular zip code in California, he knows what it means because he knows the demographics of that zip code and what’s going on in the California economy. When cotton prices fluctuate, he knows how that affects all sorts of businesses. And so on.
The third aspect is the way he looks at business models. The best way I can describe this is that it’s as if you and I see an animal, and he sees its DNA. He isn’t interested in whether the animal is furry; all he sees is whether it can run and how well it will reproduce, which are the two key elements that determine whether its species will thrive.
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Day 76
26 August 2022
Subliminal Break Day
An Excerpt from Albert Einstein during an interview in 1929.
Albert Einstein’s thoughts about free will.
“My own career was undoubtedly determined, not by my own will but by various factors over which I have no control - primarily those mysterious glands in which Nature prepares the very essence of life, our internal secretions.”
“It may interest you,” I interjected, “that Henry Ford once told me that he too, did not carve out his own life, but that all his actions were determined by an inner voice.”
“Ford,” Einstein replied. “may call it his inner voice. Socrates referred to it as his daimon. We moderns prefer to speak of our glands of internal secretion. Each explains in his own way the undeniable fact that the human will is not free.”
“Don’t you deliberately ignore all psychic factors in human development? What, for instance,” I asked, “is your attitude toward the subconscious? According to Freud, psychic events registered indelibly in our nether mind make and mar our lives.”
“Whereas materialistic historians and philosophers neglect psychic realities, Freud is inclined to over-stress their importance. I am not a psychologist, but it seems to me fairly evident that physiological factors, especially our endocrines, control our destiny.”
“Then you do not believe in psychoanalysis?”
“I am not,” Einstein modestly replied, "able to venture a judgment on so important a phase of modern thought. However, it seems to me that psychoanalysis is not always salutary. It may not always be helpful to delve into the subconscious.
The machinery of our legs is controlled by a hundred different muscles. Do you think it would help us to walk if we analyzed our legs and knew exactly which one of the little muscles must be employed in locomotion and the order in which they work?"
“Perhaps,” he added with the whimsical smile that sometimes lights up the somber pools of his eyes like a will-o’-the-wisp, "you remember the story of the toad and the centipede? The centipede was very proud of having one hundred legs. His neighbor, the toad, was very much depressed because he had only four. One day a diabolic inspiration prompted the toad to write a letter to the centipede as follows;
“Honored Sir: Can you tell me which one of your hundred legs you move first, when you transfer your distinguished body from one place to another, and in what order you move the other ninety-nine legs?”
“When the centipede received this letter he began to think. He tried first one leg, then the other. Finally be discovered to his consternation that he was unable to move a single leg. He could no longer walk at all! He was paralyzed! It is possible that analysis may paralyze our mental and emotional processes in a similar manner.”
Albert Einstein’s Thoughts About Imagination vs Knowledge
(I am sure I didn’t put Mind’s Eye into my custom for nothing…)
“I believe in intuitions and inspirations. I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am. When two expeditions of scientists, financed by the Royal Academy, went forth to test my theory of relativity, I was convinced that their conclusions would tally with my hypothesis. I was not surprised when the eclipse of May 29, 1919, confirmed my intuitions. I would have been surprised if I had been wrong.”
“Then you trust more to your imagination than to your knowledge?”
“I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
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Day 77
27 August 2022
Subliminal Break Day
Excerpt from a biography about Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim.
But the expansion of Slim’s empire has by and large focused on a region of the world where the word “democracy” was first heard in earnest only a couple of decades ago, and where the law of the jungle sometimes prevails above all others.
Perhaps this is why I was not surprised to find out that Slim likes the stories of the Mongol emperor who ruled one of the largest empires in the history of humanity. Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, a New York Times bestseller written by Jack Weatherford, is one of his favorite books, and he gifted me a copy after the following explanation:
“This book was interesting to me because Genghis Khan didn’t change the laws or the religions of the countries he occupied and he allowed free trade. He was savage when it came to conquering, but that was only when there was resistance, and in that he was no different than others.”
For a few minutes Slim relates some of the Asian emperor’s military strategies. He tells me, for example, how he destroyed a European army that was much more heavily armed than his own. He explains how Genghis Khan sent out some of his cavalry to threaten confrontation. Soon after, the cavalry pretended they were losing and began to retreat, drawing the enemy army forward, so that as their troops followed they started to lose their original formation, their cavalry separated from the infantry until they came to a place where the rest of Genghis Khan’s warriors waited in ambush, ready to kill the cavalry first, then the infantry. “Genghis Khan and his men managed to undermine the cohesion of occidental European armies; they knocked the bottom out of them by displacing and undoing their formations, tricking them into thinking they were already victorious, and taking advantage of their slow speed, because they were very heavily armed, very burdened. Genghis Khan was an extraordinary strategist.”
“Don’t you feel like there’s a similarity between you and Genghis Khan? You are the first Latin American businessman to become the world’s richest man, a position that had only previously been occupied by men from more developed countries. Do you feel like a modern Genghis Khan of sorts?” I ask.
“No, no. In an agrarian society there were wars, ransacking, conquests, slaves. Those were completely different paradigms, and he was a great conqueror who went far. Which is strange, because his own society was more primitive; that is, he was technologically behind those he conquered because he relied on the speed of the horse and on people’s courage, attacking with bow and arrow on horseback, with very astute and sometimes very aggressive battle and conquest strategies, and he sought to conquer also through negotiation. Those were times of war and he fought against armored armies, which he defeated despite them being technologically more advanced. Genghis Khan filled a very important stage in history, and his was the greatest conquest in the world, greater than that of Alexander the Great: Genghis Khan was the man who most transformed the world in the second millennium.”
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Day 78
28 August 2022
15 minutes of QL/ME Custom
I was in an out of a vivid dream last night. I can’t remember much but I did remember waking up in at 5 am early in the morning and wondering if it should have been around 6 am as my mind seemed to have been very busy.
Some excerpts from an interview with Ray Dalio.
Intelligence and Happiness
Intelligence and happiness probably have no correlation with each other. In studies, it’s repeatedly been shown and money is very little correlated with happiness. The highest correlation with happiness is community. Am I part of a community? Do I feel connections with other people? That’s been literally genetically programmed into us – it’s estimated between a million and two million years ago before we were even mankind.
About the human mind
There are two yous inside you. There is the thoughtful you, prefrontal cortex-type of thoughtful you. Then there’s the subliminal, emotional you. You’re not aware, actually, of the subliminal, emotional you. That’s why it was Freud’s great discovery that there’s this subliminal that’s really controlling you. But you’re not in your consciousness. There are those two yous and they’re often at odds. The classic example would be, of course, something where you did something that you didn’t want to do.
You ate the cake that you didn’t want to eat. Or you punched somebody or something. There are these two yous that are in a battle for each other. What we’ve observed on a constant basis is that in addition to having disagreements between people, we see that the emotional, subliminal them often can be in control of their more thoughtful them.
Those are ongoing battles. That’s basically the battle. That’s the battle that almost everybody all the time is doing. Imagine how confusing it is. You have two yous within you that are battling with each other. Then somebody else you’re dealing with has two within them. It can get difficult.
About looking beyond one’s own experiences.
(This is an important goal of mine.)
One of the things that I’ve learned over the years is that many surprises come because things that happen as surprises never happened in one’s lifetime before. It’s advantageous to look beyond one’s lifetime and beyond one’s own experiences to understand how the world works so that one can anticipate all of those things and learn all the rules of how the world works. That’s the beauty of it, right?
History repeats itself
Before I deal with the particular economic history, I’ll start off by saying I believe that basically everything is another one of those. In other words, almost everything happens over and over and over again through history. The key to success is to identify what one of those it is and to look how it’s worked in the past many times. Then to understand the cause/effect relationships to develop one’s principles for dealing with it. It could be applied to anything. We were talking about economics.
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Day 79
29 August 2022
Subliminal Break Day
My auditory imagination is growing stronger than my visual imagination. I regularly imagine songs being played in my head, with both lyrics and melody. Sometimes I can imagine an orchestra playing.
On another note, I am wondering if someone called my name this morning while I was still in that state between sleep and wakefulness.
How quickly time passes! Very soon, I will be close to spending three months on this Quantum Limitless treatment I’m planning to run this QE/Mind’s Eye custom until the end of the year at the very minimum - that will mean about five months of running the custom.
From how I can see it, three months is barely a dip in the ocean, given that I’ve struggled with learning issues for a long time.
Recently, I’ve had more thoughts about how technology should be able to help me achieve my goals.
With regards to the goal of being a faster and more productive reader, one useful piece of technology that has helped me tremendously is the e-ink reader that I have procured.
The e-reader helps me organize all my desired reading material into one place, and I’ve also learnt how to create my own ebooks in epub format.
In fact, learning how to create an ebook in epub format has in a way allowed me to understand html better, and this is something I want to understand more.
With more organized reading habits, it’s easier for me to progress to the next stage of learning (at the very least in terms of text-based material).
That aside, I’ve mentioned previously in another post a while back how technology has helped me go round some of my learning disabilities.
Of course, a big challenge for me now is regaining the confidence to drive a car. Auto-transmission technology had been helpful to me for getting my driving licence, but I’ve been very much interested in electric self-driving vehicles which have come up in the market. Surely such new technology will help me in this aspect.
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Day 80
30 August 2022
Subliminal Break Day
More often than not, I’m questioning the thoughts that come into my head.
I ask myself why I am thinking about something I desire in particular and I what is the end goal when I have that thought.
This interview with Bruce Lee in 1965 is worth a watch.
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Day 81
31 August 2022
Subliminal Break Day
From an old post made in another thread last year which I still think makes sense.
These days, I’ve begun to view a lot of things in terms of capital and archetypes.
Most people who succeed in life, they have some sort of capital that is expressed in intellectual, emotional, social, physical, financial or institutional forms.
At the same time, a person’s archetype makes it easier to acquire and utilize certain types of capital to achieve their goals.
For example, the type of capital that is best for Athlete archetype to achieve his goals would be different from that for a Sage archetype or a Joker archetype.
Apart from that, the environment we are born in often distorts our perceptions about what we really need and want, and how we should go about using the right types of capital to achieve our goals.
So in a sense, there is a strong nature vs nurture theme in everyone’s life.
So I guess at the end of the way, it is really important that we learn about ourselves and find out what we really want.
Subliminals therefore, are a tool for capital development. Based on what I understand about myself and my current circumstances, I will focus on growing intellectual capital until early next year, before moving on to other areas of capital development.
“Capital as such is not evil; it is its wrong use that is evil. Capital in some form or other will always be needed.” Mahatma Gandhi
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Day 82
1 Sept 2022
Subliminal Break Day
Finally managed to do some cleaning up of my living environment.
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Day 83
2 Sept 2022
Subliminal Break Day
Day 84
3 Sept 2022
2 loops of QL/ME Custom
Day 85
4 Sept 2022
Subliminal Break Day
While I was in my state of half-wakefulness in the morning, I unconsciously visualized myself at a certain location which I visit regularly in my real life. I have visited that location since I was a young kid, and so in my dreamy state I somehow “shrank” myself to the size of my seven-year old self to try to recreate the environment of that location when I was seven.
I felt myself shrinking physically but everything around me was in some white-light and while I “knew” that I had gone back to that time I wanted, I couldn’t see or hear anything from the surroundings of that era. In any case, the effect lasted for a second or two.
Or had I been influenced by reading about the Doddleston messages?
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Day 86
5 Sept 2022
Subliminal Break Day
I have been refining my digital commonplace ebook by just focusing on people and businesses I want to learn about.
My digital commonplace ebook is becoming some sort of text-based Secrets of Akasha - perhaps I will just give it such a title - as I keep on adding more and more interview transcripts, excerpts from biographies/memoirs/ autobiographies as well as case studies of companies that I come across.
It’s becoming an immersive experience reading through even small portions of this ebook of mine. At times, I have this “awareness” that what I am reading is the expression of somebody else’s consciousness put into words. Yet, at the same time, I realise that I am beginning to read the material with the idea that there is only one consciousness.
Therefore, is all the literature I am reading actually an expression of my own consciousness and thoughts?
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Day 87
6 Sept 2022
Subliminal Break Day
It looks like I’ve reached the end of the first cycle for my QL/ME custom. After a washout of five days, I will run this for another cycle before I decide if I want to roll back to QLST2 ZP for two cycles.
I’m thinking that I could also do a strategy of running two cycles of one stage of QL ZP before running two cycles of my QL/ME custom.
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An excellent idea.
A good way to punctuate and diversify your Quantum Limitless run.
I’m considering various configurations too (between my core Customs stack and other programs). For now, though, I’m just going to keep things straight-ahead. I’ll acclimate to my 3 customs and everything else can wait.
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Day 88-89
8 Sept 2022
Subliminal Break Day
I’ve finally found a simple cure to better sleep - by turning on the air-conditioner. I am starting to sleep longer and dream more vividly.
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Any update on Photoreading?
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No, no updates on that front yet.
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Day 90
10 Sept 2022
Subliminal Break Day
Day 91
11 Sept 2022
7 minutes of ME/QL custom
This is the start of the second cycle of my ME/QL custom.
Richard Feynman’s Chess Analogy
The late great genius explains the process of rational inquiry via chess analogy.
"One way that’s kind of a fun analogy to try to get some idea of what we’re doing here to try to understand nature is to imagine that the gods are playing some great game like chess. Let’s say a chess game. And you don’t know the rules of the game, but you’re allowed to look at the board from time to time, in a little corner, perhaps. And from these observations, you try to figure out what the rules are of the game, what [are] the rules of the pieces moving.
You might discover after a bit, for example, that when there’s only one bishop around on the board, that the bishop maintains its color. Later on you might discover the law for the bishop is that it moves on a diagonal, which would explain the law that you understood before, that it maintains its color. And that would be analogous we discover one law and later find a deeper understanding of it.
Ah, then things can happen–everything’s going good, you’ve got all the laws, it looks very good–and then all of a sudden some strange phenomenon occurs in some corner, so you begin to investigate that, to look for it. It’s castling–something you didn’t expect.
We’re always, by the way, in a fundamental physics, always trying to investigate those things in which we don’t understand the conclusions. We’re not trying to all the time check our conclusions; after we’ve checked them enough, they’re okay. The thing that doesn’t fit is the thing that’s most interesting–the part that doesn’t go according to what you’d expect.
Also we can have revolutions in physics. After you’ve noticed that the bishops maintain their color and that they go along on the diagonals and so on, for such a long time, and everybody knows that that’s true; then you suddenly discover one day in some chess game that the bishop doesn’t maintain its color, it changes its color. Only later do you discover the new possibility that the bishop is captured and that a pawn went all the way down to the queen’s end to produce a new bishop. That could happen, but you didn’t know it.
And so it’s very analogous to the way our laws are. They sometimes look positive, they keep on working, and all of a sudden, some little gimmick shows that they’re wrong–and then we have to investigate the conditions under which this bishop changed color… happened… and so on… And gradually we learn the new rule that explains it more deeply.
Unlike the chess game, though… In the case of the chess game, the rules become more complicated as you go along, but in the physics when you discover new things, it becomes more simple. It appears on the whole to be more complicated, because we learn about a greater experience; that is, we learn about more particles and new things, and so the laws look complicated again. But if you realize that all of the time, what’s kind of wonderful is that as we expand our experience into wilder and wilder regions of experience, every once in a while we have these integration in which everything is pulled together in a unification, which it turns out to be simpler than it looked before."
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Day 92
12 Sept 2022
Subliminal Break Day
Day 93
13 Sept 2022
2 Full loops (15 minutes) of ME/QL Custom
Day 94 - 96
14 Sept to 16 Sept 2022
Subliminal Break Day
– Productivity not very high in the past few days. I think it’s more related that what I think I should do to achieve my goals, or perhaps what are my goals in the first place.
– Some tingling in my forehead and above the nose-bridge.
– I have a feeling that the experience of reading certain material has become more “immersive”
– Auditory imagination remains strong and my mind always seems to have a song playing in my head when I am not thinking about anything.
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Day 97-98
17-18 Sept 2022
Subliminal Break Day
Darn. Accidentally deleted my previous post. Will rewrite it again when I have time.
Day 99
19 Sept 2022
3 minutes of QL/ME Custom
After last week’s 2 loops of 15 minutes, I’m going to try running only 3 minutes of my custom subliminal for a week.
Interesting that I’ve already been on this treatment for almost 100 days now. I’ve decided I will run by QL/ME Custom for one more cycle before moving on. That would mean 3 cycles of QL/ME Custom and I’m sure something significant will kick in in the third cycle, which will be in October 2022.
In any case, I’m clearer about my key goals for this custom subliminal.
– I’m interested in developing that ability to easily capture, integrate and synthesize the information from whatever I read and learn.
– My secondary goals are to improve my sense of awareness, my motor-coordination, and some visual handicaps as well as my executive function.
– In addition, given that I’ve spent quite a lot of time in recent months building my own ebooks, I think that an ebook production business is something that I’m looking to explore.
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Day 100-103
20-23 Sept 2022
Subliminal Break Day
Had a strange dream. As I didn’t bother to actually record in detail the happenings of the dream after waking up, I have forgotten a lot of details. I am therefore trying to piece together what I dreamt about with whatever I can remember, though some details may be wrong.
I had to wake up earlier for a conference call with some people in another time zone. Before that, I think I was in and out of dreams as I slept and woke up intermittently only to go back to sleep again.
In one of my dreams, I was running late for a physical meeting which I had to attend. I was still waiting for a taxi to take me to the location when I realized that that the meeting was actually to be held online. Feeling relieved that I could just log on to the meeting from my home, I was also surprised that my counterparts were not online for the meeting. The next thing that happened was that I suddenly became aware that I was in Barcelona in a meeting with an ex-colleague for a different topic.
The strange thing is that when I had my actual Microsoft Webex meeting when I woke up from my dream, a client who was supposed to join us did not appear.
Day 104
24 Sept 2022
1 full loop of QL/ME Custom
I feel that my thinking about world events, as well as local events around me, has become a bit more structured, and I am beginning to be aware that there are many many layers to world events. My understanding at the moment is that at different layers, there are different stakeholders.
I have also become more skeptical of learning about something from just one source, and will always attempt to learn about the situation from another perspective, and sometimes another layer.
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