George Underwood - A Head of Our Time

http://www.georgeunderwood.com/pages/Gallery/45

How to easily make your own powerful binaural affirmation programs with Winamp

So, wanna pay for tapes or embrace the self made man concept?

A really easy & powerful way to enjoy the benefits of repetitive thought - listening to your affirmations.

The steps:
Carefully choose, brainstorm, design, adjust & tweak your affirmations.
Record each one in a separate audio file. I prefer to repeat each affirmation 3 times per file.
Create a list of a few related affirmations and let them play in random order again and again in Winamp.

Now, if you wanna get fancy & sophisticated, play the affirmations independently for each ear & cerebral hemisphere. You'd better put on the headphones (you'll find this really handy at work :) Being repetitive, and binaural, your conscious mind (unlike the unconscious one) will forget about them, which is good. You can listen to them while working on the computer, they'll permeate the subconscious in an even easier way.

If you let them play for an hour, at say 5 sec each, you'll have 720 repetitions. For 3 seconds, 1200 repetitions. Multiply that by a number of say 21 days of listening. And double it if you use:) the easy binaural system detailed below.

1. I'll assume that the microphone is installed & working.
2. Record the affirmations. A file per affirmation. A folder for all of them. You can use the Sound Recorder from Windows'' Programs > Accessories > Entertainment.
I suggest to keep a text file handy to jot down the affirmation ideas that you'll wanna record.
3. Open Winamp. Go to Preferences (Ctrl+P) > General Preferences > check 'Allow multiple instances'.Close Winamp to enable the setting.
4. I suggest dragging & dropping a Winamp shortcut on the QuickLaunch bar (or on the desktop).
5. Open two Winamp instances, put them side by side, check the Repeat and Shuffle buttons & slide the balance buttons to the left and, respectively, to the right.6. Open the affirmation playlist in each of the Winamp instances, put on the headphones on and hit play. Tadaaaa. Enjoy. :)

Useful dictionaries

Onelook.com - The biggest, in the sense that it searches through LOTS of dictionaries and returns links to them. Great for, but in no way limited to, rare, specialized terms.

Dictionary.com - Offers on a single page definitions from multiple reliable dictionaries. I use it with the excellent FastDic Firefox extension.

Rhymezone, Thesaurus.com, Internet Anagram Server - pretty self explanatory names, huh?:)

Wordsmith's advanced search:










International House of Logorrhea - A 15,500-word dictionary of obscure and rare words briefly defined

MoreWords.com - Find dictionary words for crossword puzzles, code words and word games like Scrabble, Upwords and Jamble.

Looking for more dictionaries? Check out Glossarist.com or yourdictonary.com

Milton Erickson, aka "the dictionary man"

"The art of suggestion depends upon the use of words and the varied meanings of words. I've spent a great deal of time reading dictionaries. When you read the various definitions that the same word can have, it changes entirely your conception of that word and how language may be used."

M.H.Erickson and Ernest Rossi - Experiencing Hypnosis, 1981

"[...]The most blinding, dazzling flash of light occurred in my sophomore year of high school. I had the nickname in grade school and high school, "“Dictionary,"” because I spent so much time reading the dictionary. One noon, just after the noon dismissal bell rang, I was in my usual chair reading the dictionary in the back of the room. Suddenly a blinding, dazzling flash of light occurred because I just learned how to use the dictionary. Up to that moment in looking up a word, I started at the first page and went through every column, page after page until I reached the word. In that blinding flash of light I realized that you use the alphabet as an ordered system for looking up a word. The students who brought their lunch to school always ate in the basement. I don'’t know how long I sat there completely dazzled by the blinding light, but when I did get down to the basement, most of the students had finished their lunches. When they asked me why I was so late in reaching the basement, I knew that I wouldn'’t tell them that I had just learned how to use the dictionary. I don'’t know why it took me so long. Did my unconscious purposely withhold that knowledge because of the immense amount of education I got from reading the dictionary?"

The American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, July. 1977

Firefox extensions you may find handy

A click can make the difference between in-formed and dis-formed:)
The shorter the chain of clicks, the better the feature.
(BTW, here are the Firefox mouse & keyboard shortcuts (thanks Lifehaker.com))

I fancy dictionaries. I believe that if you know more words, you get access to more choices, which means better than just smarter. Oh, yeah, and probably richer:)

Having the explanations within my fast & easy grasp (not just in the should's reach), laziness or haste don't get involved anymore, and I naturally continue to learn bunches of words and CONCEPTS on a regular basis :)




FastDic provides a fast way to lookup words in dictionary. Hold the Alt, Ctrl or Shift keys and click any word in web page. The word is automatically selected and its meaning page is open in a new tab, new window or sidebar.





Excellent extension. My favorite features: undo close tab, drag & drop tabs, multiple rows of tabs, crash recovery.




Select your categories, push the toolbar button and navigate to interesting sites that you wouldn't have found otherwise. You can choose to be led to sites from all the categories that you specified, or to select just one of them.
Addictive, can be used as a non-productivity buster :)

Awesome image generator - Plasma Pong

Stumbled over Plasma Pong, a game that generates "customizable" dynamic graphics that seem quite exquisite to me.

"An image can express more than a thousand words". My psyche may have "chords" that I don't recognize yet, and an image could resonate with them, serving as a bridge, a translator, an intermediary, a stepping stone between my official understandings and some of the "things" within. An abstract image may help me establish a better connection and get in touch with the discreet whispers of some of my soul's unrecognized chords.

I'm getting pompous here, I know, but didn't I want to use the blog for this very reason? :)

BTW, have you seen Andrei Tarkovsky's Solyaris? A mysterious thinking ocean planet dances and messes there with the characters' lives and with the viewer's patience - the excruciatingly slow motion beauty of an exclusivist movie. Pompous, yeah... :)

PS: Some visual effects may cause problems to those with epilepsy. Please take care.