Exploring The Shift
The shift is not a thing. It is the action of discovering Self.

Developing an interest in art recently I just found an interesting photoshop contest on worth1000. The contest objective is to take a fine art picture and remove the people, leaving everything else in place.

The results are eerie but also entertaining and exhibit an amazing mastery in photoshop given that missing parts, e.g. background in a place where a human body part was, need to be repainted in a realistic way.

And in a way this is strangely inverse to nude art and porn. In those you see people without clothes, here it is the opposite.

Contest Link

Usually when people hear about conscious creation they immediately go into some extreme details, like asking if you put this to work, could you get run over by a bus and walk away unharmed? The reasoning behind this is the idea of cause and effect, i.e. that a specific event always has the same outcome.

I'd like to change the question a bit and provide an answer in form of a video: If a truck topples over and falls on your car and crushes it flat, can you walk away unharmed?

See for yourself (but don't try this at home, at least not unless you're sure you mastered the belief system of cause and effect):

Miracle - video powered by Metacafe

I'm normally not interested in military issues and for what it is worth, I'd be more a peace activist than a soldier, although in fact I'm neither.

But when I read about Project Valour-It, which tries to give speech enabled computers to veterans with hand and arm injuries, I immediately wanted to lend some energy in form of money and blog attention, because I see it a project that is first and foremost for people and not the military and because it is a fine example of humanity and brotherhood.

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Something nice to make after a walk on an autumn Sunday (or any other autumn day): Making roses from maple leafs

I came across a news snippet from LA Weekly recently which I like because it outlines the immense creativity in humans and because it's a nice metaphor for overcoming separation.

There's a beach between Mexico and the U.S. with no signs, no parking lot, no lifeguard but with a huge border fence made of metal pylons which are rammed into the sand and going out far into the water. It's a place where nobody except the border patrol is supposed to come to.

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I mentioned yesterday that I appreciated ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

There are two versions of that. On the one hand there are those stories which arise out of the circumstances of ordinary life and which touch the heart, like Team Hoyt or the Walking Dog . On the other hand I appreciate projects which, when measured by normal standards , are useless, stupid or crazy (or all of that at the same time). Projects which defy the idea of productivity and which are done out of pure fun, simply because someone wants to do them or wants to know if they can be done. I guess part of the fun comes exactly from the lack of rationale behind them, like building a hamster wheel for a cat or making realistic replicas of guns from paper.

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I recently found a nice website which is about sightings of animals on a subway plan. It somehow makes me smile every time I look there, because it is such a funny and unique idea.

There's not much more to say about it, except that it is a nice example of how perception creates reality and how you can pass time in creative ways. I guess next time I'm in another city riding a subway or bus I'll probably fetch a stack of those plans and will make sure that I will have a text marker handy.

(found on www.haha.nu)

I recently found three nice flash applets which lets you play with music in interactive ways.

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