(Auto-generated)Welcome back, you wonderful people who matter so very, very much. I'm WS Walker and this
is the Laughing Matters Podcast. Now towards the end of the last episode, I proposed a
toast to you. And I'm going to do the same thing again today and hold off a minute on
pausing the show and getting something to toast with me. But a toast regarding whatever
it is that's going on with you at the moment. Whatever the most prevalent issue in your
life is right this very second. Whatever it is that your mind keeps getting drawn towards
and is currently bringing the most stress to the table. Well, I'm not going to solve
it for you. That's not what this toast is about. I can't solve it for you. Each problem
has their own individual nuanced right answer solution. But I can offer some tools for dismantling
it to find the right answer to it. The answer that puts the most good out in the world.
You just have to remember to use those tools when you need them. You have to remember that
these tools exist when you need them. That's your end of the deal. But for just a second
here, I want to be one human being that you apparently like listening to, telling you
that I'm hopeful for you, that I'm rooting for you, that I believe you have it in you
and that ultimately you've got this if you want this. That I believe you will choose
to do good by them. And hey, if you need any advice on how to use these tools, some of
my book in action, so to speak, reach out and send me a message. I'll put my contact
details in the description of the episode. I have information and understandings that
you won't hear anywhere else and advice has been a superpower of mine. I'm good at a
broad spectrum of stuff, but I call the stuff that I'm really great at my superpowers. But
enough tooting my own horn. More importantly than my help, God's got this. If you let
him, you know, not choosing the right solution and electing not to do the right thing usually
results from avoiding personal discomfort or because doing the right thing would act
against whatever preference that people have set for themselves. So here's a toast to
letting God lead for all the reasons that I've previously laid out. So go ahead and
grab a glass, but don't fill it up yet because I've got a unique suggestion for this toast.
What's two things you've heard superstition wise about toasting someone? You never toast
with an empty glass. That's one, and that makes sense to me. You know, it parallels
too close to making an empty statement of agreement, to going through the pageantry
and motions of supporting what's being toasted, but with no actual content or belief in it.
So that makes sense to me. That's easy to see why someone would nudge you and be like,
hey, don't do that. But the other superstition that immediately springs to mind is you never
toast with water. Well, why is that? The super short version of the history of it is the
ancient Greeks thought that offering water to the gods would be considered too bland
and would anger the gods. They also thought it was reminiscent of the dead drinking the
water from the river Styx, which is something the dead did because it took away their memories
of the life they lived. So that's where the superstition comes from, and I'd like to address
both of these. Firstly, when I sit on my porch and I talk to God, I like to have a glass
of water with me. It's kind of similar to having a beer with a friend or a parent. And
yes, I toast God with it as well, even if it's a simple friendly cheers. So why water? Well,
I feel more interconnected with God when I drink water. I mean, it's one of the purest
and most necessary ingredients to life. It's good for you pretty much every time you imbibe
it. And the only components that are more immediately necessary are air and temperate
climate. And if I filled up my glass with room temperature air, well, I already stated
why I kind of agree with the not toasting with an empty cup tradition. Having a glass
of water with God, it's the closest that I can get to filling my glass with pure life.
So while taking some notes for this episode, I played a hunch and I looked up how many
times the word water appears in various religious texts. In the Holy Quran, 63 times. That's
about once every 10 pages or so. The Torah? I could not find a count. But likening the
Torah itself to water is described as a staple in rabbinic writing. So that's a pretty good
sign, right? In the Tripitaka, which is a sacred text of Buddhism, the highest level
of Nirvana is likened to the merging of a droplet of water to the sea. And I'll read
the next bit from the research collection directly. In Buddhism, water symbolizes life,
the purest form of food. And water is the particular element, which in nature carries
everything together. Water symbolizes purity, clarity, and calmness, and reminds us to cleanse
our minds and attain the state of purity. Okay, so we're banging out all cylinders
so far. But the Bible is a whole different matter. Water is mentioned a total of 722
times, which is a lot more often than the word hope, which is pretty cool. Prayer, which
is a big one. Worship, and in this one shocked me. Faith, which appears about 336 to 458
times depending on the translation version. It literally appears roughly twice as often
as the word faith. So this to me seems like it's the action of raising a glass of some
of the most important stuff on earth, stuff that acts in similar ways to the highest level
of Nirvana, the Torah, and the Holy Spirit itself. And I believe God probably recognizes
the symbolic gesture there. And if he minds me doing it, he's given me the opposite reaction
impressions. We'll leave it at that. So all of that aside, let's just consider
Amoto's water experiments, in which he took different jars of water, played different
types of music for them, spoke to them with different tones. Some were told, you disgust
me, while others were told that they were loved. And then he froze them and took photos
through a microscope of the crystallized structures that were formed at the top. He also took
some water from a badly polluted dam and photographed the freezing crystallizations before and after
a Buddhist monk prayed over it. I highly, highly recommend looking up this guy's photography
on these. It's Imoto. He's Neko, M is Mike, O is an October, T is Ntango, O is an October.
Please look up Imoto water. Because you see, those that were subjected to beautiful music
or phrases or words that were positive in nature, when frozen, they produced beautiful,
simple, but also complex structures with radial symmetry. And the jars subjected to negative,
hateful phrases and music were not symmetrical and were rather ugly and unappealing to look
at. The photos of the dam water looked deadly and sickening. But once the water was prayed
over, it produced the most beautiful, but complex crystalline structure of all of them.
Now, okay, it's true that scientists had a field day with pointing out that the photos
could have been cherry picked and decided from hundreds of photos, allowing the outcome
to be swayed. But as someone who has dealt with photographing microscopic details that
are not pressed on a slide, I can tell you that it is enormously difficult to get a picture
of anything given the extreme shallowness of depth of field. If you've ever seen this
type of photography before, you'll notice that everything but part of the photograph
is out of focus. And that's before accounting for lens fogging and freezing temperatures,
which is a nightmare. Now, there was a scientist out there that undertook replicating the results
in a controlled environment and following the strict protocols demanded in order to
produce scientifically sound evidence. But he had to take hundreds of photographs in
order to capture just a few in focus ones. Now, he attempted to overcome this issue of
cherry picking these photos to represent each result by posting them all online and asking
people to rate the beauty of what was in each photo and then plotted each jar's results
on a graph to compare. Now, sadly, with hundreds of out of focus photos in the mix, the results
were inconclusive. But don't fret, because luckily, literally hundreds of people out
there have taken it upon themselves to perform a MOTO's RICE experiment. And it's very simple.
You can do it at home. What you do is you get three mason jars and fill them halfway
up with white rice. And then fill the rest of each jar with clean water from the same
source. And then you screw down or latch down airtight lids. You take them and place them
in three different locations, but with similar temperature and sun exposure conditions. The
only thing that should be different from each jar is how you treat each jar. With the first
jar, you make nothing but loving statements, telling it how proud you are of it, how happy
it makes you, compliment it, and always make a point to acknowledge it with a smile. Be
that jar's loving support and hype man at least once a day. The second jar, you yell
at or put down or telling it how much you hate it or how ugly it is and how much of
a waste it is or how you never should have assembled the rice jar and water to make such
an idiotic thing. Really, lay into it at least once a day. And the third jar, make a point
to never look at it or acknowledge. If you do look at it, avert your gaze quickly and
forget about it as quickly as you can. Do not acknowledge this jar at all. This jar
is the control of the experiment and shows what happens to the rice without any involvement.
It's nature taking its course. You see, just like Modo did, those hundreds of people performed
these actions and interactions with the jars for 30 days straight, and then opened the
jars. The loved jar of rice most often looks very regular, uniform white, and smells okay,
if not sweet. Our untouched control jar still grows mold, sometimes greenish, sometimes
yellowish, and sometimes with speckles of black. When opened, most report an unpleasant
smell. But the hated jar always rots straight black down the middle, and its smell is absolutely
putrid. So not only does water react to hate in a very, very ugly way, feeding it kindness
and love, and other positive emotions, preserves it, makes it better, and restores. Just like
us. Interesting. Why do I bring this up? All I'm saying is that there is far more to water
than just a boring, colorless, tasteless drink. Someone recently pointed out to me that the
flavor of water is the temperature at which it's served, which I found weirdly accurate.
So I hope this addresses the superstition that it would anger the gods for being bland.
It's pretty much the most interesting, communicative liquid there is. Now, as to the parallel drawn
to drinking waters from the River Styx, all I have to say is, which liquid is more likely
to impede your memory and has more of a chance of you ending up in the River Styx early?
Water or alcohol? Come on, y'all. So that said, pause the show and fill up a glass.
And let's toast.
Alright, glasses up. God, thank you for all of this, and for helping where you've helped.
Please help us to find those solutions and to help us know which one is not just best
for me, but best for all of them. It's impossible for us to know outright with certainty what
the best decisions are because we can't know all of their consequences. And right now,
I have stuff going on that I am not certain what I'm going to do about it. So please navigate
for this blind pilot. And here's to you, you wonderful Creator that matters so very, very
much.
Cheers.
And remember, going outside, taking off your glasses, and having a drink of water with
God, that's something you can do nearly any time. You can ask His advice on any subject,
have a chat, pretty much whenever you feel like doing so. So why aren't you talking to
God all the time? That's a question I ask to you, but also to me. And distractions would
be my inherent answer to that. There are so many of them that fill my day, and what time
I do have away from work is actively searching for something to fill it. But entertainment
offers a very one-sided deal. You don't have to do much or anything at all to spend an
entire day entertaining your mind one way or another. It's kind of pure gimme in that
way. Except it does cost something, something we'd rather not think about. It costs you
time, which is taken from a container that you cannot ever know how far it is from empty.
So I'm just saying, finding a quiet spot to sit outside with a glass of water can go a
long way towards reducing potential distractions. Talking to God about your problems, I mean,
outside of Him helping you, just talking to Him can help tremendously. Because there's
this really interesting thing that happens when we're dealing with a source of stress
and thinking about it. The brain, when something is bothering us, has this weird tendency to
act like our vision. Now before in the book, I'd talked about how we take in new information,
and we tend to discard any new information that is baseline, unchanged, or predictable.
Like looking out at your backyard and not taking in every blade of grass. Instead, you
just scan for anything new or out of place. Well, our vision, when you first look at something,
works a lot like a mind toiling over conflict. When you're taking in a new sight, you don't
just look at the whole thing at once and take in all the information as one completely in
focus picture. Instead, if you watch someone's eyes as they look at something for the first
time, their eyes dart all around it, piecing together a mental understanding and forming
a picture of said new thing. So I want you to try something here. I want you to close
your eyes without thinking about it right away. Just do it. Close them. Unless you're
driving, do not close them if you are driving and listening to the podcast. But otherwise,
you're not listening. When you open them again, not yet, but when you do, I want you
to try to notice the first places your eyes go to and piecing together the environment
that you're in. Go ahead and open them. You see, the eye darts around all over, but it
always starts with whatever it is that has the most contrast to the rest, whatever it
is that stands out the most. And then it starts to look at the other parts that stand out.
The thing that stands out the most always comes back to that. And when you're thinking
about something that you're stressing over, that's causing you mental anguish, your brain
does the same thing. It keeps coming back to that biggest hurt or that biggest conflicting
piece of information, the thing you do not understand about the situation or the thing
that is hurting you the most. And it bats against it like a moth against a light bulb.
And it may examine other information, but it keeps coming back to that. And when you
talk about something, when you express the situation that you're in, when you tell someone
else about what you're going through, because they aren't you, they're not working from
your quote unquote file cabinet, you have to lay it out for them in a chronological
order. You have to organize it to put it out. And in doing that, just in talking about it,
you are putting things together in an A to B to C to D fashion instead of A to B to A
to C to A to D to A to A to A to A to C A to D A to B, maybe some A to B, B, B, A, A,
A, Y, A. Instead, you think about it in a way that makes sense. You actively make a
productive step towards making sense of it. Have you ever noticed when you go to a friend
with a problem and you start telling them about it, half the time you make it halfway
through, you already know what it is that you need to do about it. You may not want
to face that that's the case, but you typically kind of figure it out as you talk about it.
Believing to God is great for that. He's not going to tell anybody, by the way, you can
trust him. I'd say give it a think, but give it a talk and grab you a glass of water. Now
this is kind of a weird episode if you're new to the show, but if you are in fact new
to the show, welcome. Firsters and seconders will back me up and tell you that you do,
you need to go back and you need to listen to the book, which is season one of the podcast.
It starts at preface and ends at chapter 10, the strings. So go back and listen to that
before progressing or you are going to miss out on a lot of context on what's going on
with the new episodes. You can listen to the episode before this one, episode 17, if you
want to skip the preface, but go ahead. Stop here, listen to the book and we'll see you
in like a week or so. But oh, before you go, good luck. You know, you don't know. Good
luck. You very well may not want to think about or examine as closely as we do in the
book, but I think you'll also see why it's so important that we do. So the rest of you
be good to them, be good for them and you're going to be phenomenal. This is WS Walker
signing off. Be sweet.