As A Man Thinketh #2 You Are Today Due to the Books that You (or Don't) Read

“People are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves; they therefore remain bound”
(James Allen, As A Man Thinketh)

We spend hundreds of ringgit a year for clothing, cosmetics, body products and other items to change or improve our outward appearance but very little money or time to change our inward condition. Many people easily spend hours a day online, going to gym, playing games, watching series and movies but find every reason in the world not to spend even a few minutes a day to improving their minds.

Since it is our thoughts that determine the life we will have, you must focus on doing those things that will change your thoughts, and nothing is more effective at changing your thoughts than reading the right books. Charlie ‘Tremendous’ Jones writes, “You are today the same you’ll be in five years from now, except for two things: the people you meet and the books you read. The people you meet can’t always be with you, but what you read in books can remain with you a lifetime. How often we hear of individuals who began a new era in their lives from the reading of a single book.”

Are you a book reader? Why not start a new habit today? Spend just 15 minutes every day in the morning or before going to bed or whenever you’re most concentrate and focus. Read from a personal development book or biography of someone you admire (ask me if you want my book suggestions on both topics). At the end of a year you will have read about 12 books – at the end of a five years about 60 books! Through your changed thoughts you will have become much more like the “vision you enthrone in your heart.”

As English writer Aldous Huxley observed, “Every person who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant, and interesting.”

Think about it!

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

References:

1.      As A Man Thinketh (1903) by James Allen

2.      Day by Day with James Allen (2003) by Vic Johnson

As A Man Thinketh #1 Don't Limit Your Mind

“A person is limited only by the thoughts that he chooses”
(James Allen, As A Man Thinketh)

You are not limited to the life you now live. It has been accepted by you as the best you can do at this moment. Any time you’re ready to go beyond the limitations currently in your life, you’re capable of doing that by choosing different thoughts. Don’t limit yourself.

Cynthia Kersey author of Unstoppable writes about this amazing story of George Dantzig. As a college student, George studied very hard and always late into the night. So late that he overslept one morning, arriving 20 minutes late for class. He quickly copied the two math problems on the board, assuming they were the homework assignment. It took him several days to work through the two problems, but finally he had a breakthrough and dropped the homework on the professor's desk the next day.

Later, on a Sunday morning, George was awakened at 6 a.m. by his excited professor. Since George was late for class, he hadn't heard the professor announce that the two unsolvable equations on the board were mathematical mind teasers that even Albert Einstein hadn't been able to answer.  But George Dantzig, working without any thoughts of limitation, had solved not one, but two problems that had stumped mathematicians for thousands of years. Simply put, George solved the problems because he didn't know he couldn't.

Bob Proctor tells us to “keep reminding yourself that you have tremendous reservoirs of potential within you, and therefore you are quite capable of doing anything you set your mind to. All you must do is figure out how you can do it, not whether or not you can. And once you have made your mind up to do it, it’s amazing how your mind begins to figure out how.”

Think about it!

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

References:

1.      As A Man Thinketh (1903) by James Allen

2.      Day by Day with James Allen (2003) by Vic Johnson

3.      Unstoppable: 45 Powerful Stories of Perseverance and Triumph from People Just Like You (1998) by Cynthia Kersey

Essential Thinkers #18 Galileo Galilei: The Quest for Knowledge Amidst Religious Dogmatism

Italian philosopher, astronomer, scientist and mathematician, Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642) is probably best remembered for his work in support of Copernicus’ heliocentric theory of the solar system. For the sake of his life, Galileo recanted his views in 1633, admitting that the earth did not spin on its own axis. It is unlikely that the recantation was sincere and he nevertheless remained under house arrest.

In 1608 the Dutchmen Lippershey invented the telescope. Within two years Galileo used it to dramatic effect, showing by his astronomical observations that the Ptolemaic or geocentric theory which held that the Earth was at the centre of the universe, was seriously flawed. Galileo also observed that the Milky Way was in fact made up of many millions of individual stars. He observed the phrases of Venus and discovered the moons of Jupiter, which had theological experts up in arms. Indeed, Galileo’s findings attracted such sharp criticism, both from secular and ecclesiastical quarters that he felt compelled to offer, both in his defence and in reply to his critics, the Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina in 1615. In the Letter, Galileo argues that scientific and theological matters should not be confused. Science could not cast doubt on religious doctrine, only strengthen it. Nonetheless he was condemned by the Inquisition, first in private communication in 1616 and later in 1633, when he publicly recanted.

Although his work was instrumental in bringing the Copernican system into prominence, Galileo was far more than just an astronomer. Much of his important work lay in dynamics and the principles of movement. He was the first to discover the law of falling bodies, or constant acceleration, published after his recantation and whilst still under house arrest in 1638, in his Discourse on Two New Sciences.

Moreover, what would later be Newton’s celebrated first Law of Motion was directly taken from Galileo’s principle of inertia, namely that a body moves in a straight line with uniform velocity unless acted upon.

This principle was important in helping to support the Copernican theory. Critics of Copernicus had claimed that if the heliocentric theory were true, then a falling body should not fall in a straight line, but in fact land somewhat to the west of the point from which it was dropped, on account of the eastwise rotation of the Earth. It had been proven by experiment that this was not the case, a result which led many to dismiss Copernicus as wrong even if they did not share the religious reasons for dismissing him. It took Galileo’s work in dynamics to show why the prediction was not fulfilled. Simply put, the falling stone retains the rotational velocity of the Earth.

Philosophically, Galileo held that “the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.” He was heavily influenced by Greek philosophy and a great admirer of Archimedes. He also maintained, like John Locke, that there was a metaphysical distinction between the primary and secondary qualities of bodies. The former are essential and inherent in objects, whereas the latter exist only insofar as they cause certain effects in the minds of observers. Undoubtedly, Galileo was a great thinker who risked much in the pursuit of truth, helping to set free the quest for knowledge from the chains of religious dogmatism.

[Summarized from Philosophy 100 Essential Thinkers by Philip Stokes, 2012]

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

Essential Thinkers #17 Francis Bacon: Scientific Method and the Problem of Induction

English philosopher of science, Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was the forerunner of the famed British school of philosophers that include John Locke, David Hume, George Berkeley, J. S. Mill and Bertrand Russell. Bacon’s important works include The Advancement of Learning, New Atlantis and the Novum Organum. Bacon was also an essayist and enjoyed a successful legal and political career, in particular after James I’s succession of Elizabeth, whereupon he was made Lord Chancellor until being found guilty of corruption.

Attributed as the originator of the saying “knowledge is power,” his importance as a philosopher is most notable with regard to his concern for scientific method. Bacon was troubled by the two schools of thought that had come out of Platonism and Aristotelianism respectively. Firstly, the rationalist view that knowledge could be gained by examining the content and meanings of works – a view Bacon dismissed as like spinning a web from the inside of one’s own head. Secondly, the Aristotelians, intent on collecting masses of empirical data, where equally useless at helping a man arrive at any scientific hypotheses. What was needed, insisted Bacon, was a new way of collecting and organising data that would help generate inductive hypotheses.

Bacon, like many of his contemporaries and predecessors, had been concerned with the problem of induction, a problem that would later receive an astonishingly sceptical response from David Hume. The problem of induction, as Bacon’s contemporaries saw it, was that the mere repetitive occurrence of an incident does not guarantee that the same thing will happen again. To give a simple example, suppose a man draws nine blue marbles out of a bag of ten (9/10). It is no more likely that the tenth marble will be blue than it is that it will be red. The previous instances do not guarantee anything about the following instance.

Bacon saw that the answer to this problem lay in placing the emphasis of investigation on looking for negative instances to disconfirm hypotheses, rather than finding ways of confirming them. This is striking precursor to Karl Popper’s twentieth century falsificationist scientific methodology and his much vaunted claim of ‘solving the problem of induction.’ As Popper readily admits, he owes much to Francis Bacon.

However, unlike others of his time and later David Hume, Bacon was less interested in the problem of justifying inductive generalisations, than in how to generate good inductive hypotheses out of the masses of data collected by observation. Bacon revised a new method. To illustrate it, Bacon shows how one might generate a hypothesis on the nature of heat. One should, Bacon tells us, list all those things in which the property under investigation, in this case heat, is present, then all those things in which the property is absent and finally all those cases which admit of varying degrees of the property in question. From such list, Bacon believes the natural hypothesis will present itself, which in this case, as he well knew at the time, is that heat is produced according to the movement or excitation of molecules within a body.

Although Bacon’s method is undoubtedly one way of applying order to a body of data, and even perhaps a useful way in some cases, it nevertheless seems unlikely to fulfil his ambition, which was to find a systematic way of deriving scientific hypotheses from the arrangement of data. It is unlikely that there ever could be such a system. Bacon failed to take into account the creativity and imaginative aspect of scientific theory building. No matter how systematically one organises data, inductive hypotheses cannot be guaranteed to appear out of them. One may find that some facts deductively follow from a certain ordering of data, but that is not what Bacon was after.

Despite his failure in this regard, Bacon nevertheless made some important contribution to the philosophy of science and the problem of induction, not least, as we have seen, in being the first to stress the importance of negative instances.

[Summarized from Philosophy 100 Essential Thinkers by Philip Stokes, 2012. Also watch YouTube 60 Second Philosophy: Francis Bacon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsScx7oeHOs]

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

I Wonder #8 How Do People Age?

Ageing is a result of the gradual failure of the body’s cells and organs to replace and repair themselves. This is because there is a limit to the number of times that each cell can divide. As the body’s cells begin to near this limit, the rate at which they divide slows down. Sometimes the new cells that are produced have defects or do not carry out their usual task effectively. Organs can then begin to fail, tissues change in structure, and the chemical reactions that power the body become less efficient. Sometime the blood supply to the brain is not effective. The brain cells become starved of oxygen and nutrients, leading to forgetfulness. For most old people memories bring great pleasure. Strangely, even though recent events may be forgotten, old people often clearly remember events that took place in their childhood.

Fact: The skin becomes looser as people age. As skin sags it forms into wrinkles and creases because the fibres of collagen that normally provide support to the skin became weaker.

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)