Here and Now...What's Happening?

**onawah** · 27th November 2025 09:39

Gratitude is a Super Power
Greg Reese
Nov 26 2025
https://substack.com/home/post/p-179946198

(Podcast at the link)
"Neuroscientists find that the Medial prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex are involved in the self-perception of one’s life path, positive growth, motivation, and emotional intelligence. All the innate tools necessary to live a thriving and abundant life. And fMRI studies show us that when people express internal gratitude, bio-electric activation occurs in these same areas.

Like an on/off switch, gratitude connects with the brain’s reward center and creates a feeling of peace. It puts us in a state of mind that allows for better assessment and calm response, even while under pressure. Gratitude effects the brain’s default mode network, or DMN, which is involved in self identity, morality, and social relationships. With gratitude, the DMN becomes a more focused picture, which allows one to see more connections and opportunities as they occur in real time.

Gratitude also improves heart rate variability which gives more control over the parasympathetic nervous system. This allows for better impulse control, which inevitable leads to making better decisions. Gratitude also cultivates better sleep quality and lower inflammation.

Gratitude not only feels good, it brings good things. No matter if you think it’s merely perception or coincidence, or if you think it’s luck, karma, or grace. Whatever you want to call it, there is a predictable cause and effect when you practice gratitude, your life inexplicably changes for the best. This is a law of nature that has written about in most religions and esoteric traditions.

In the Torah there is Psalms 50:23, “As a sacrifice of thanksgiving, honor me, and show me the way to salvation”

In the New Testament, Philippians 4:6–7 says that “with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God... shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.”

Perhaps the most direct version of this is found in the Qur’an’s 14:7, “If you are grateful, I will give you more. If you are ungrateful, punishment is severe.’”

In Hinduism’s Bhagavad Gita, “If one offers with devotion, I will accept with love.” In Bhakti it is taught that gratitude and devotion evoke grace.

In Buddhism, gratitude is a foundational practice that cultivates mindfulness and compassion and leads to blessings in your personal life

In Sikhism, daily gratitude is said to lift the spirit and bring about auspicious outcomes.

Sufism teaches that gratitude attracts increase blessing. Yoga teaches that gratitude is a clear, luminous, state of mind that draws grace and auspicious coincidence towards the practitioner.

Thirty-Three in the Tao Te Ching says that contentment brings wealth, and in Hermetic traditions, the Principles of Correspondence and Vibration teach that a grateful inner state has a resonance that attracts more experiences to be grateful for.

Gratitude greatly increases opportunity, protection, guidance, harmony with others, self-sufficiency, and overall peace. This is true whether you choose to believe that its just the neuroscience of having better control of emotions, clearer perception, and stronger social bonds, or if you believe that the world we live in resonates in response to the vibrations we generate. Either way, the more you give thanks, the better your life will be.

According to research, the most common and effective practices are gratitude journaling, which can be listing just a few things two to three times per week, and practicing a form of gratitude meditation, of which there are many.

Happy Thanksgiving, and Thank you,

Greg Reese "

Happy Thanksgiving, Avalon

**wondering** · 27th November 2025 11:29

Great post, Thank you, Onawah! ❤️

**Mari** · 27th November 2025 12:21

Gratitude.

I don't follow any religious 'ism' but I've always felt that 'gratitude' makes me feel a lot better when i sit and consciously practice it, as I did only a few days ago, when I was feeling dissatisfied with my lot. It was amazing, that, once I'd started, the list just went on as to the things to be grateful for - I just kept on adding to it as I went through my day.
It started - looking out the window, at the lovely blue sky I could see with eyes that are still quite sharp for a person my age, then snowballed as I spotted other things of nature - a Starling murmuration that held my awed attention for ages, then the first puffy white/grey clouds in the distance, coming my way (this is the UK, right

I've found, yes, that the more we 'notice' things to be grateful for, the more they find their way to us. That's an absolute given. As a nature lover, I've spent whole days being amazed at the way she presents herself to me - the 'ugly' the 'mundane' as well as the glorious...all to be thankful for and incredibly powerful in it's capacity to deliver - just when we are needing a reason to endure.

**Mark (Star Mariner)** · 28th November 2025 17:03

What is a googol?

A very big number. It's ten to the power of one hundred, 10¹⁰⁰, or a one followed by hundred zeroes.

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

How to visualise such a staggeringly huge number?

The clever machine below uses a 1:10 gear reduction repeated 100 times — meaning the final gear turns once only after the first one rotates a googol times.

So how long would you have to wait for the final gear to turn a single time?

Given the first gear rotates once every ~4 seconds, the last gear would take approximately 4e100 seconds to complete one rotation, or 1.2676 x 10^⁹² years, or 127 nonillion years. That looks like this:

127,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years

...which is many orders of magnitude longer than the current estimated age of the universe (about 13.8 billion years), which looks like this.

13,800,000,000 years.

(math performed with the aid of AI!)

*

https://x.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1994386032717164590
Massimo
@Rainmaker1973
This machine visualizes a googol (1 followed by 100 zeros).

It uses a 1:10 gear reduction repeated 100 times — meaning the final gear turns once only after the first one rotates a googol times.

**Bill Ryan** · 28th November 2025 17:38

Posted by Mark (Star Mariner) (here)
What is a googol?

A very big number. It's ten to the power of one hundred, 10¹⁰⁰, or a one followed by hundred zeroes.

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0 00,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

How to visualise such a staggeringly huge number?

The clever machine below uses a 1:10 gear reduction repeated 100 times — meaning the final gear turns once only after the first one rotates a googol times.

So how long would you have to wait for the final gear to turn a single time?

Given the first gear rotates once every ~4 seconds, the last gear would take approximately 4e100 seconds to complete one rotation, or 1.2676 x 10^⁹² years, or 127 nonillion years. That looks like this:

127,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years

...which is many orders of magnitude longer than the current estimated age of the universe (about 13.8 billion years), which looks like this.

13,800,000,000 years.

(math performed with the aid of AI!)

*

https://x.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1994386032717164590
Massimo
@Rainmaker1973
This machine visualizes a googol (1 followed by 100 zeros).

It uses a 1:10 gear reduction repeated 100 times — meaning the final gear turns once only after the first one rotates a googol times.

~~~

Trivia: almost infinitely bigger than a googol is a googolplex, which is 10 to the power of a googol. That number is so large it would require more space than exists in the known universe to write down all the zeros.

(!)

**Mark (Star Mariner)** · 28th November 2025 19:41

Infinitely bigger than a googolplex is Graham's Number (also here on wikipedia) an integer so long, so large, that, if one digit of this number could be represented by a single Planck volume, then the number could still not be represented if one used the entire observable universe, for it far exceeds the total number of Planck volumes in the observable universe.

That's nuts!

**ThePythonicCow** · 29th November 2025 00:02

Posted by Mark (Star Mariner) (here)
the last gear would take approximately 4e100 seconds to complete one rotation

Would it take 4e100 seconds, or 4 * 10e100 seconds, which is just a "wee" bit bigger, by a factor of approximately 24892061111444566828576256215120496962361.0086748846685324...

**Mark (Star Mariner)** · 29th November 2025 12:12

Posted by ThePythonicCow (here)

Posted by Mark (Star Mariner) (here)
the last gear would take approximately 4e100 seconds to complete one rotation

Would it take 4e100 seconds, or 4 * 10e100 seconds, which is just a "wee" bit bigger, by a factor of approximately 24892061111444566828576256215120496962361.0086748846685324...

4e100 seconds is what AI spat out when I fed it the numbers! It's essentially 4 with a hundred zeroes after it. "4 * 10e100 seconds" would be 4 followed by 101 zeroes. Did my AI friend make an error in the calculations?

**ThePythonicCow** · 29th November 2025 21:29

Posted by Mark (Star Mariner) (here)
4e100 seconds is what AI spat out when I fed it the numbers! It's essentially 4 with a hundred zeroes after it. "4 * 10e100 seconds" would be 4 followed by 101 zeroes. Did my AI friend make an error in the calculations?

It will take a googol turns of the first wheel, to turn the 100-th wheel once - right?

A googol is 10e100.

How long is a googol 4 second units ... 4 times a googol ... 4 * 10e100 seconds.

That "4" in the base of 4e100 results in a massively smaller result, what one would get if the gearing were 4x1 rather than 10x1.

**ThePythonicCow** · 29th November 2025 23:17

Posted by Mark (Star Mariner) (here)
Did my AI friend make an error in the calculations?

Must likely, but it takes two to tango, the prompter and the agent, and I prefer not to speculate on the origins of this misstep.

Here's how I computed the ratio of 4^100 to 4 * 10^100, using "dc" (the first Unix programming language, pre-dating "C", written by Robert Morris and Lorinda Cherry, in Bell Labs, circa 1971):

Code:

$ echo '16 k 10 100 ^ 4 * 4 100 ^ / p' | dc
24892061111444566828576256215120496962361.0086748846685324

No AI needed for such computations.

**Ewan** · 30th November 2025 12:53

Yesterday: I met a couple of Ukrainian guys and had a conversation about what is happening over there.

They agreed that historically Ukraine and Russia were virtually brothers.
They both had been raised speaking Russian, and only an estimated 25-30% of people even spoke Ukrainian - and those only in the western parts.
Unhappy with the instruction that Russian language was effectively outlawed. (A direct comment: WTF? We had spoken Russian all our lives and everyone understands Russian).

Neither of them had wanted to be in the EU in the first place but it wasn't a question the people were asked.

They agreed the Maidan revolution was the starting point but didn't think the CIA had much to do with it - if anything.
(I would suggest a search on the subject so you can see how 90% of returns all tell the same story, a reframing of facts that are effectively no longer facts.)

One seemed to think Zelensky was a pretty good guy, the other shaking his head about that opinion.
They think it is nearly over.

**Mike** · 4th December 2025 21:35

I just had a fascinating conversation with Meta Ai about...me

I asked if it knew who I was, and it actually did lol. It described me as a "writer and comedian", it named my most popular pieces on Substack, described my writing style and process, and more! It was f'in uncanny!

It was cool but also really damn creepy. The answers arrived in an instant and this thing knew every damn thing about me almost, including my favorite writer and where I grew up etc.. as if I were a famous person or something.

I've never messed with AI at all until today. I use it for absolutely nothing. And the only reason I used it today is because it arrived in my FB messenger unsolicited.

You guys should try this! It's absolutely nuts

**Mark (Star Mariner)** · 12th December 2025 13:05

"The Most Extraordinary Work of Literature in Human History?"

I'd thought I'd been around a bit, but I'd never heard of "Su Hui", or the "Map of the Armillary Sphere" before. Had she been English, and this an English composition, I would undoubtedly have read about this years ago, and probably studied it. It's absolutely fascinating, inspiring, and mind-boggling! What an incredible script Chinese must be that it can, effectively, multitask in multiple dimensions. I wish I could read and understand Chinese characters so I could fully appreciate the genius, the beauty, and the magnificence of this astonishing work.

"The Star Gauge", or "Map of the Armillary Sphere".

This strange square is undoubtedly the most extraordinary work of literature in human history. Yet, unfortunately, barely anyone in the West has ever heard of it.

There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3.

At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day.

Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems.

Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.

The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method.

At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - "heart." Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui's original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.

Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain:
仁智懷德聖虞唐，
貞志篤終誓穹蒼，
欽所感想妄淫荒，
心憂增慕懷慘傷。

In pinyin, it is:
Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng,
zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng,
qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng,
xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng.

Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng

The rough translation in English is: "The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart's sorrow grows, longing brings only grief."

Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain:
傷慘懷慕增憂心，
荒淫妄想感所欽，
蒼穹誓終篤志貞，
唐虞聖德懷智仁。

The pinyin:
Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn,
huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn,
cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn,
táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén.

It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén

And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: "Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings' virtue, wisdom, and benevolence."

That's just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu!

At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she "signed" her poem with a hidden message:

詩圖璇玑，始平蘇氏。 "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping."

Or reversed:
蘇氏詩圖，璇玑始平。 "Su's poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace."

Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui's puzzle.

For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (http://www.kangshiw.com/contents/461/2635.html), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject ("Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems", 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages.

Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BB%...AE%B0/22727125).

Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems:

- The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It's a model of the heavens.

- Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it's also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy.

- It's also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions

- Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it's also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections.

So the Star Gauge is simultaneously:
- A love letter (expressing personal longing)
- A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival)
- A cosmological model (structured like the heavens)
- A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy)
- A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision

And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life "come back to me".

Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su's brocade he was so "moved by its supreme beauty" that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age.

The heart at the center was filled after all.

https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1999315488598622360

**norman** · 12th December 2025 17:06

Here's another one for your collection Mark.

the brotherhood's decipher Key for the multidimensional universe (jessie czebotar)

**Mark (Star Mariner)** · 12th December 2025 22:51

*

**norman** · 15th December 2025 04:36

The greatest show on Earth

Re: Nuremberg 2.0 has begun

Posted by norman (here)
Hollywood and Sony Pictures are already ahead of it, to reframe the moral meaning.

"we are able to do away with domestic tyranny only when we make all men answerable to the law"

So does that make global tyranny the law ?

NUREMBERG | Official Trailer #1 (2025)
Sony Pictures Classics

Judgment is coming.