Community Level

As we studied about a table of potential application of theories, models, and approaches on last Saturday. I have found a story that is good in level 2 (Community Level). 

CNN has reported the 6th V-Star Change the World Day

  1,000,000 V-Star Children gathered in this event at Dhammakaya Temple on Saturday January 28th, 2012.  This event is a part of the World Morality Restoration Project of Dhammakaya Temple.

 The dmc.tv staffs had shot photos and video clips of the 6th V-Star Change the World Day on January 28th, 2012 and reported them on CNN iReport, one of the CNN editors was interested in this news and picked it up to present in the homepage of CNN iReport in a few days later. So, the story of 1,000,000 V-Star Children doing good deeds together has spread in the cyberspace over the world speedily.

On CNN on-air the Video that there are Million of Vstar Kids from all over Thailand come to meditate at The Great Dhammakaya Cetiya, Patumthani Province Thailand. On-Air time :
Thursday 16 Feb 2012, 0830 GMT
Friday 17 Feb 2012, 0330 GMT
Saturday 18 Feb 2012, 0800 GMT
Saturday 18 Feb 2012, 1730 GMT
Saturday 18 Feb 2012, 2230 GMT
Sunday 19 Feb 2012, 1430 GMT
Monday 20 Feb 2012, 0230 GMT 

The 6th V-Star Challenge Day
The Project: The leaders of World Morality Restoration
On Saturday January 28th, 2012

          More than 5,000 schools in Thailand have faithfully participated. Since the V-Star Unity Project began in 2007, organizing committees for the program have provided full scholarships and all manner of learning media as well as equipment to both facilitate and directly cultivate a genuine moral and ethical awareness for all the youth who have attended the project. read more

The Dhammakaya Temple was founded by a nun Khun Yay Ubasika Chandra Khonnokyoong in 1970. Then, the temple expand to the world. There are more than fifty centers outside of Thailand.

   Normally, the Dhammakaya temple's members  learn dhamma and meditation from the Dhamma Media Channel (DMC). The DMC is a Buddhist satellite television and a white channel, ethic channel. It broadcasts, for 24 hours a day, media programs based on Buddhist teachings. DMC programms are suitable for all viewers regardless of age, gender, religion, race, nationality, and sexual orientation. read more

    I think this is the  non-profit organization that is in the level 2. The positive activities are the community members expand their power from within and create desired to change the world. It is not easy to gather a million children to meditate together. 

    I also think about Level 3 (Interpersonal Level) on 3.2 Diffusion of Innovations. The V-star's program on January 28, 2012 had the Abbot at Wat Phra Dhammakaya to lead them to meditate. The children followed him. They trusted him because of his Buddhist credentials.

    

        The Project is still in progress and will change the world.

 

might as well post it here too

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OU897UKXJ3Q

Taking inventory

The following quote comes from this post on Mashable, "Social platforms are still in their Precambrian era."  Really?  If that is the case I feel like I could become an extinct species drowning in the tar pits of various log-ins and I wonder how other people deal with the dilemma of so many accounts.  Just off the top of my head here is what I need to log into, and this doesn't even include paying bills as this is something my wife handles:
- School e-mail
- All my research articles I saved in the library database
- Hotmail (friends)
- Gmail (For my eventual job search)
- Work e-mail (I'm not in a cubicle so it's remote)
- Uniform link (from work, not synched)
- Same with my HR access
- Travel access via Delta
- Scanner for luggage @ work

Then we start going into the different social media tools:
- Facebook for me
- Facebook for an online game I play for the bonuses
- Linked In
- Posterous
- StarTribune.com (which will be ending since they feel this need to charge me)
- NonRevTravel.net
- ESPN360.com
- Yelp.com
- Tripadvisor.com
- and on and on and on.......

I think part of my issue is that one time, my hotmail account was hacked because of a stupid link. It was a clever enough password but I had to come up with something new and I started using that with new sites while older sites still had the old password.  Then there are my essential sites, my work login's.  There is no  consistency and all have unique requirements to their password structure.  That doesn't even include the one that needs to be changed every 90 days.  

So I struggle.  Have others been like this and have you figured out a solution?

Facebook in My Daily Life

Facebook in my daily life

Facebook is  social media that makes my daily life very busy.  When I stop for a moment and look at how different it is from ten or even five years ago. I really know that my life is not the same. My life has totally changed. However, it is better than in the past.

I use Facebook for my everyday life. I spend a lot of time reading several posts from different groups. For example, I have joined with Meditation groups; I gain a lot of knowledge from them. I have more than a thousand of new friends. I have learned how to create attractive images and post them with useful texts. Facebook is good social media that helps me to present my skills. I also have blogs. People are finding my blogs  from Facebook referrals rather than via Google.

 read more

 What is Facebook

 Facebook is a social networking website launched in February 2004 that is operated and privately owned by Facebook Inc.  Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskoyitz and Chris Hughes. January 2009, Compete.com study ranked Facebook as the most used social networking service by worldwide monthly active users.  

read more

 I hope everyone enjoys Facebook. We use social media for our daily lives. It can give all of us greater choice in how we live and what happens in our world. 

 

Have you done anything pinteresting today?

If you are interested in joining Pinterest you typically have to request an invitation. I have heard from people that you can get the invitation sent to you pretty quickly, or you could end up on a wait list for a couple of weeks. Pinterest users can also send out invitations. If you are interested in signing up with Pinterest, and need an invitation, comment on this post. I will then send you an invitation.

Happy Pinning!

Also, I saw these articles on Twitter today. Check out the one about hospitals using Tumblr.

This article is how Pinterest can boost your search engine optimization (SEO).

Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive Dissonance is the feeling of uncomfortable tension which comes from holding two conflicting thoughts in the mind at the same time. 

Feeling uncomfortable is a form of confusion caused by the brain 'short-circuiting' as it struggles to make a connection and decision based upon past experiences.  And those past experiences may have little or nothing to do with the situation that is immediately present.  But the brain (the ego) wants to come to an immediate understanding in order to make a judgement.  This judgment used to serve us well as a 'fight-or-flight' response.  It was a healthy fear kept us alive.  This kind of fear is the brain's default and go-to response, but fear can also overstep its bounds in an undisciplined mind. 

I believe emotions are a gift that are part of the human experience.  Science is proving emotions are a built-in system of chemical releases that stem from memories of experiences. These chemical releases signal an opportunity for growth, learning, and evolution. Whether that opportunity is accepted or rejected is up to the individual that is experiencing the emotion.

If a person can sit and simply 'be with' an extreme emotion, without reacting to it, just simply feeling it and moving through it, we refer to that person as mature, even as 'aware of himself'.

The opposite, is stated here in the movie Seven, by Detective Sommerset (Morgan Freeman) speaking to Detective Mills (Brad Pitt).

It's impressive to see a man feeding off his emotions

Now, I feel it is up to us as conscious and aware human beings to undertake actions that rewire our brains, and move away from responses based on fear of the unknown.  We can do this by looking at facts before us, putting aside our selfish desires, and focusing on the betterment and welfare of all people on this planet.

By taking the actions that rewire the brain, we begin to become more aware of our immediate and self-damaging behaviors. With out those actions, the mind remains undisciplined and we experience self-damaging behavior.


Let me illustrate .

Thought: "I want a soda."

It is a fact that adding large amounts of carbon dioxide and sugar to the human body is inherently poisonous to the system.  So after the initial 'I want a soda' thought, if a person consciously stops to think that they are considering drinking a poisonous liquid, then that person could be considered aware.

If a person does not have this thought, they may be considered either unaware of their own impulsive behaviors, otherwise, they are simply in a state of denial. And, the inability of a person to be honest with themselves is a form of insanity.

But let's say the person does have that conscious thought, 'this is inherently poisonous'. They are left with the choice of whether or not put that destructive chemical into the human body.

Also to be considered is, if the soda is consumed, what will be done with the empty bottle?

Lets say the type of plastic the bottle is made of is not recyclable in this state, and that the person has that information.  Here is another choice to be made. The choice of whether or not to pollute the environment/planet.

Logic, science, and personal honesty says: “DO NOT DRINK THAT OR POLLUTE THE ENVIRONMENT.  BOTH ACTIONS WILL EVENTUALLY KILL YOU.”

But the selfish ego says: “But I like it.  I like the way it tastes and I like how it makes me feel. If it eventually kills me and the pollution eventually kills the planet... so what?  I do I feel bad about it, but there's nothign I can do.  And I want to feel good now.  This is the way I prefer to do it.”

Many times the soda is bought anyway, and it is consumed. In other words, a person does what they want now, and regardless of the known negative consequences of such action.  If confronted by another person about their behavior, they experience cognitive dissonance.  The they become uncomfortable and confused.  Uncomfortable-ness and confusion can be construed as 'weaknesses' in our society/culture. 
In order not to appear weak, the ego rises up and the person will respond in the form of anger, denial, or 'running away'. This is our new version of fight-or-flight.

So what would be the difference between a the person buying the soda and a person addicted to heroin? 
The answer: Only the extremes to which each person would immediately go based upon their level of awareness.  Both care, but not to the extent to which they are willing to change their behavior.

That, I believe, is insane. And that is how we live.

  

*********

“People are locked into a box.  They see the box around them. 

They see the leaks and the holes, and the cracks. 

They go to the cracks, and they try to fix them. They try to patch the holes. 

But they don’t stop to think that maybe there is something wrong with the box itself. 

Maybe the integrity of the box they exist in is inherently flawed. 

The economic system we live in is a parasitic paradigm that is only going to lead to self-destruction.

We live in a very sick and fucked up culture.  We really do. 

Society is mentally ill. 

To be ‘normal, is to be messed up.  

But people don’t see that.” 

~HUMAN: The Film~ 

Human the film (2012) Part 1 from joseph mccoy on Vimeo.

Posterous

For the class assignment I reviewed Tumblr, Posterous, Path, and Pinterest, finally deciding Posterous would be a great place to begin to develop a website where I could develop a personal site, collectively organize unusual phenomena, and learn how to utilize the attributes of this site for the promotion and avocacy of organizations.. 

Admittdly, it has been a struggle utilizing Facebook to gather images and ideas together (such as the Fibonacci sequence, information on the ancient Mayans, the Golden Ratio, henges, crop circles, DNA structuring, frequencies and sound waves, etc/) into a format where ideas can grow or connections between such unusual subjects could be made.

This is simply because the design of Facebook is not conducive to organizing more complex ideas, but more suited to 'chronologial driveby's' of ideas and experiences.

I look forward to exploring more of what Posterous has to offer, and may write another post here once I learn more.

Thanks.




http://rednaxelasalo-chin.posterous.com/