Ideas worth talking about.

truth is a pathless land

"So, what do you know? You know a lot. You have gathered all this knowledge from various sources and filled it up. Most of it is not necessary. You know a lot and you want to know more and more and more -- to use it. Of course. There's no such thing as knowledge for the sake of knowledge. It gives you power. Knowledge is power. "I know; you don't know." That gives you power. You may not even be conscious that your knowing more than the other gives you power. In that sense, knowledge is power. To acquire more and more knowledge, more than the knowledge that is essential for the survival of the living organism, is to acquire more and more power over others.

The technical knowledge that you need to make a living is understandable. That's all. I have to learn a technique. The society is not going to feed me unless I give something in return. You have to give them what they want, not what you have to give. What do have you to give? You have nothing to give anyway.

Otherwise, what value has this knowledge for you? To know more about something which you really do not know.

We are always talking about thought and thinking. What is thought? Have you ever looked at thought, let along controlling thought; let alone manipulating thought; let alone using that thought for achieving something material or otherwise? You cannot look at your thought, because you cannot separate yourself from thought and look at it. There is no thought apart from the knowledge you have about those thoughts -- the definitions you have. So if somebody asks you the question, "what is thought?" any answer you have is the answer that is put in there -- the answers that others have already given.

You have, through combinations and permutations of ideation and mentation about thoughts, created your own thoughts which you call your own. Just as when you mix different colors, you can create thousands of pastel colors, but basically all of them can be reduced to only seven colors that you find in nature. What you think is yours is the combination and permutation of all those thoughts, just the way you have created hundreds and hundreds of pastel colors. You have created your own ideas. That is what you call thinking. When you want to look at thought, what there is is only whatever you know about thought. Otherwise you can't look at thought. There is no thought other than what there is in what you know about thought. That's all that I am saying. So when that is understood the meaninglessness of the whole business of wanting to look at thought comes to an end. What there is is only what you know, the definitions given by others. And out of those definitions, if you are very intelligent and clever enough, you create your own definitions. That's all.

When you look at an object the knowledge you have about that object comes into your head. There is an illusion that thought is something different from objects, but it is you who creates the object. The object may be there, but the knowledge you have about that object is all that you know. Apart from that knowledge and independent of that knowledge, free from that knowledge, you have no way of knowing anything about it. You have no way of directly experiencing anything. The word "directly" does not mean that there is any other way of experiencing things other than the way you are experiencing things now. The knowledge you have about it is all that is there and that is what you are experiencing. Really, you do not know what it is.

In exactly the same way, when you want to know something about thought, or experience thought, it is the same process that is in operation there. There is no inside or outside. What there is is only the operation, the flow of the knowledge. So you cannot actually separate yourself from thought and look at it.

So when such a question is thrown at you, what should happen is [the realization] that none of the answers have any meaning, because all that is acquired and taught. So that movement stops. There is no need for you to answer the question. There is no need for you to know anything about it. All that you know comes to a halt. It has no momentum any more. It slows down, and then it dawns upon you that it is meaninglessness to try to answer that question, because it has no answer at all. The answers that others have given are there. So you have nothing to say on that thing called thought, because all you can say is what you have gathered from other sources. You have no answer of your own."-- U. G.

subliminal advertising

I came across this Derren Brown video clip on You Tube called Subliminal Advertising.

His voiceover says:

…Those who work in advertising are masters of persuasion. They subtly weave their images and slogans into our daily lives knowing that we will register so much unconsciously. Then we walk into a supermarket and feel a sense of familiarity with a product we think we never heard of. Millions of pounds a year are spent on it. It’s brilliantly calculated and we all fall for it.

If only it were that easy to influence people. One problem is that there is just way too much advertising competing for people’s attention. It’s hard for a brand to stand out in the mind of a potential customer when she sees an estimated one million marketing messages a year.

However, I suspect people who saw this video clip view ad agencies much like this: guys who wear black tee shirts; have shaved heads who sit in a secret room where they devise a master plan to plant subliminal messages in unsuspecting minds, in much the same way Derren Brown did to them.

But it’s hard enough to get it right for the conscious mind, why target the unconscious mind?

Unless I missed something in my advertising schooling, I don’t recall subliminal marketing 101 or how to write for the unconscious mind. (maybe this could be a new class ;)

Is there really time to create well-orchestrated subliminal advertising campaigns?

Here’s the reality of advertising: politics, egos, budgets and the fickle client. This blog called “Why Advertising Sucks” illustrates this point perfectly. Here are two snippets from recent rants:

You will not be told of a new business presentation until at most 48 hours until the date of presentation. Chances are this notification will be on a Friday, so that you may spend the weekend “brainstorming.”

It’s as if we creative monkeys can only execute brilliance within the target specific parameters offered by the client. What this really seems to mean though is that quite often we’ve seen what the competition is doing and the people the competition is speaking to and think they’re on the right path so why not make a spin-off of what they’re doing…
Seriously, is it that hard to come up with a rationale that isn’t irrational and isn’t a carbon copy of the instructions given to the other companies’ creative team?

The reality is not as sexy or as sinister as Derren made it out be. What do you think?

avoiding the stinky problem

Photo Credit: OpenCage

I saw a story on the TV news last night about city officials who decided to use perfume to mask the odor of the local sewage plant. According to the print version of the story, it costs about $120 a day to spray one of three scents: blackberry, vanilla or creamsicle.

And it made me think about this quote from a book I recently read.

“Most of us try to seek an answer to the problem; we are concerned with the solution, and not with the problem. We want a conclusion, we are looking for a way out of the problem; we want to avoid the problem through an answer, through a solution. We do not observe the problem itself but grope for a satisfactory answer. Our whole conscious concern is with the finding of a solution, a satisfying conclusion.

Often we do find an answer that gratifies us, and then we think we have solved the problem. What we have actually done is to cover over the problem with a conclusion, with a satisfactory answer; but under the weight of the conclusion, which had temporarily smothered it, the problem is still there. The search for an answer is an evasion of the problem.”

Page 136, Commentaries on Living, J. Krishnamurti

portland coffee

Great to see some familiar faces (Stephen, Russell) this morning at Stumptown in Portland. I enjoyed meeting Matt, Barbara, Christian, Noel and a few others whose names I didn't get. If you have a blog or a name let me know.

blind thinking

… men of good will should not have formulas; for formulas lead, inevitably, only to “blind thinking.” 

…for our system of upbringing is based on what to think, not how to think.

Consequently you respond to the challenge, which is always new, according to an old pattern; and therefore your response has no corresponding validity, newness, freshness.

From the foreword by Aldous Huxley in the book The First and Last Freedom by J. Krishnamurti

fin

Flicks & Picks
Originally uploaded by samkarp.

I paid my final respects to Flicks and Picks yesterday. Beloved by the community, for many years this video store was the only place in town to find an obscure documentary or foreign film.

Then came Netflix.

After 23 years, one of the last remaining video rental stores in Eugene closes.

"The convenience of being able to stay at home in your living room and dial up a movie or get one in the mail, it's just a changing industry and we thought this was a good time to bow out," says co-owner Dave Mendonca. (source: TV station, KVAL 13 Eugene).

Sometimes you need to realize when your way of doing business no longer makes sense and quit.

It’s interesting though how many people SAID they loved this locally owned video shop, however chose to rent videos elsewhere. As we all know, what people say they want or do is often different from their behavior.

how to get noticed

• Attach 105 balloons to your lawn chair.
• Fire 1,000 of your worst customers.
• Stock your store with Buzz cola and Krusty-Os cereal.

Benjamin Palmer talks at Cannes

I found this interview with Benjamin Palmer, Co-founder and president of The Barbarian Group hidden away in episode 3 of Arnold’s behind-the-scenes Cannes video, something they call Cannes’t. Here’s the essence of what Benjamin had to say or you can watch the video here.

Do you like advertising or hate or despise it?

I don’t like bad advertising. I don’t think anyone likes bad advertising. You use to be able to sell a lot of products and be a successful agency and be a successful brand without actually doing anything interesting.

You could buy your way in?

Yeah. The media was fixed and controlled. You could do something terrible with a logo and inundate people and you would succeed.

I love brands. It’s what gives our capitalistic world some personality. I don’t particularly care for advertising when it’s not any good.

Now, the competition is not another ad, it’s everything. You’re five minute experience has to be better than anything else someone could be doing with their life.

I’m interested in taking what you would normally use for a marketing budget and turning it into something that functionally improves the product. The worst part about advertising is when there is a shitty product and you have to sell it. When probably they should just change it so that it’s good. The product or experience should draw people in on its own merits.

back to the future

I saw this on the Fallon Planning Blog today. It goes rather well with my previous post about the future.

what's an idea worth

We are good at coming up with ideas and solving problems. That's what makes us different from any other species on the planet. Sure, our solution to a problem often creates new and more complex problems. But that's how jobs are created. Most of the interesting jobs today are about finding solutions to other people's problems. So, the question becomes: What's the processing power of your brain worth? What's an idea worth?

• Amazon's Mechanical Turk aims to harness the problem solving power of the human brain. Their offer: "Complete simple tasks that people do better than computers. Choose from thousands of tasks, control when you work, and decide how much you earn."
• At openad.net you can buy and sell advertising ideas. With a distributed network of talented, creative problem solvers will there still be a need for brick-and-mortar traditional ad agencies that are owned by holding companies?
• Here are some interesting ideas and solutions to problems (some of which, I didn't know I have) in the form of Web2.0 at "The complete Web2.0 directory."