“The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.”

~Luo Guanzhong

BEAUTY IS IN THE EYE

OF THE BEHOLDER

There is a beautiful thing inside of you that is thousands of years old. Too old to be captured in poems. Too old to be loved by everyone— but loved so very deeply by a chosen few. ❤️‍

“You cannot discuss the ocean with a well frog—

He is limited by the space that he lives in.

You cannot discuss ice with a summer insect—

He is bound to a single season.”

~Zhuang Zhou

Do not discuss your great goals and plans with those that will not understand, and those who are limited by their own mindset. No dream is too big. Do not change your mindset to fit the comfort level of others. Stop walking on thin ice. Those that love you will support you. ❤️ Those that do not will leave— as they were meant to.

“Half of life is lost in charming others. The other half is lost in going through anxieties caused by others. Leave this play, you have played enough.”

~Rumi

“Fundamentally, the spiritual way is not about what you gain.

You yourself are perfectly good as what you are.

Instead, the spiritual way is about what you do not lose.

You avoid losing your peace in the face of fear.

You avoid losing your love in the presence of suffering.

You avoid losing your clarity in the moments of anxiety.

You avoid losing your authentic presence in the supermarket of identities.

And that is enough.”

“If you can master and destroy the 12 enemies that you cannot see—egoism, arrogance, conceit, selfishness, greed, lust, intolerance, anger, lying, cheating, gossiping and slandering— you will be ready to fight the enemy that you can see. Know thyself.”

As your frequency upgrades and your intuition becomes stronger, you will notice how much other people’s energy actually affects you. The more spiritually attuned you become, the more sensitive you are to energy in general. Keep your circles pure,sacredandsmall.

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageouslyandhonestly.”

~Albert Einstein

“The truth that you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.”

~Pema Chodron

“Why be unhappy about something if it can be remedied?

And what is the use of being unhappy about something if it cannot be remedied?”

~Shantideva

EVEN THAT STEP BACKWARDS HAS A PURPOSE!

So, do not beat yourself up if it is taking you longer than you thought to change and make things better in your life.

There are no coincidences. What happened was destined to happen. Sometimes, it is too painful and too difficult to understand why, but the day will come, and the reason will be revealed to you. For now, all that you can do is trust in what is unfolding, and find inner peace.

“Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected.”

~Carl G. Jung

“Psychology and Religion” (1938).

“The Universe is already in tune with your heart’s desires. What works for your journey does not need to be explained to anyone else. You are heading in a direction that not many can follow. Keep your faith in the Divine at an all time high. Your lane is so perfectly designed; it is too unique for anyone else to fit into it. Remind yourself of all your strengths; mainly your ability to turn life lessons into life blessings. Your positive outlook and continuous gratitude is always going to place you in front of the finest, most rewarding gifts that life can offer. Staying true to your essence always makes it easier to win.”

~Esther T.

“What is better— to be born good, or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?”

~Paarthurnax

cancer-son:

We live in a world where we judge not by the content but by the shell. I recently found myself in this, judging by the social look instead of the beautiful intent. Not bothering to listen to the words or the meaning, sticking my nose up at the idea of something nor my style. Forgetting myself, forgetting you can have meaning as well as a trendy beat. You can be passionate about something without having to give up on you even if it isnt exactly societies expectation. We too often get stuck in our preconceived idea of what passion is meant to look like. It isn’t always that indie soulful band singing their hearts out to a small crowd. Or the young woman in the back of the coffee shop typing furiously at her keyboard about equality. It can look like perky trendsetters pondering on our reality over a bubbly beat. We talk about breaking the molds everyday, only to ironically create more molds on who is allowed to break those molds.

(Image caption: Vibrations are interpreted in the same way by mice and humans. Credit: ©Daniel Huber, UNIGE)

How tactile vibrations create illusions

Among the traditional five human senses, touch is perhaps the least studied. Yet, it is solicited everywhere, all the time, and even more so in recent years with the widespread daily use of electronic devices that emit vibrations. Indeed, any moving object transmits oscillatory signals that propagate through solid substrates. Our body detects them by means of mechanoreceptors located below the skin and transmits the information to the brain similarly to auditory, olfactory or visual stimuli. By studying how mice and humans perceive tactile vibrations, Swiss researchers from the universities of Geneva (UNIGE) and Fribourg (UNIFR) discovered that the brain does not reliably perceive the frequency of a vibration when its amplitude varies. An illusory phenomenon is thereby created, which highlights how far our perception of the world around us can deviate from its physical reality. The results can be discovered in the journal Nature Communications.  

Vibrations are small oscillatory movements emitted from a point of equilibrium. By propagating as waves through solid materials, they can be perceived by most living organisms. Vibrations are defined by two principle features: frequency, which signals the rate of change in Hz (i.e. the number of repetitions per second) and amplitude, which corresponds to the maximal size the wave can reach, in other words its intensity. “When for instance our phone vibrates, the vibration can vary more or less rapidly – its frequency – and more or less strongly – its amplitude”, explains Daniel Huber, professor in the Department of Basic Neuroscience at UNIGE Faculty of Medicine, who directed the study. “How does our brain interpret these physical characteristics? This is the question we aimed to answer in our study”.

Identical perception in mice and humans    

To this end, the scientists performed the same experiment in a group of mice and a group of human participants, in which they had to differentiate multiple vibration frequencies felt on the hand or the paw. “It turns out that mice are more sensitive to higher frequencies (about 1000 Hz), whereas the human sensitivity is optimal in the much lower frequency range, around 250 Hz”, explains Mario Prsa, professor in the Department of Neuroscience in the Faculty of Science and Medicine at UNIFR and the first author of the study. “However, both mice and humans have a harder time differentiating a lower from a higher frequency when their amplitudes are not matched. A specific choice of their respective amplitudes can actually create perceptual metamers: physically different frequencies that are perceptually indistinguishable. It is quite remarkable!” This illusion follows a simple principle: frequencies that are higher or lower than the most sensitive frequency – 250 Hz for humans and 1000 Hz for mice – are felt as more similar to this preferred frequency when their amplitude is increased. In this condition, a high frequency vibration (e.g. 500 Hz) thus appears to be lower than it really is, whereas a vibration whose frequency is lower to the preferred one (e.g. 150 Hz) appears to be higher. “Falling victim to this psychophysical illusion, the brain misperceives by refocusing on what it knows best” describes Mario Prsa. “Such phenomena are also characteristic of other senses, like audition, where our own perception can be fooled by very low or high volumes and rarely represents real physical attributes of sound, but rather a composite feature of several stimulus characteristics.”

A still mysterious phenomenon

How and why is this illusion created in our brains? “This question is precisely the subject of our ongoing work”, explains Daniel Huber. “At what moment exactly does the brain fail to correctly interpret tactile stimuli, and what happens at the neuronal level? And why do different species, like mice and humans, misperceive in the same way?”

The team of Daniel Huber dives even further into this topic: with the help of deaf volunteers and musicians they transpose pieces of music into the range of vibrotactile stimuli to study how deaf people can be able to perceive music.