Walking around the Vatican

This evening I went for a walk around the Vatican, something I had not done for awhile. Essentially, I forced myself out today, as I’ve been sort of locked in the hasta-per-selfieouse the whole week, due to my sore bones. Near Castel Sant’Angelo there were the usual street vendors, selling gadgets and touristy stuff. The weird thing is that usually they try to call the tourist’s attention saying “hello? hello?”. These evening instead they were saying “selfie? selfie? selfie?”. …”what the fuck?” I tought. I turned and saw that it made sense, in fact were selling these things: telescopic poles to take selfies! 😯

Anyway, there is this t-shirt that I saw in a shop in via della Conciliazione. pope-souvenir-trashDo we want to talk about it? Pure papal trash. Love it. (the words say “the pope who came from the end of the world”)

Third comes this short video that I made. I love so much the area around st Peter’s square. As a friend made me notice, I hang around the Vatican a lot, for someone who sistematically bashes religions. 🙂

old videos – da caricare

3 Shifts that improve your life conditions

The following are three shifts that I strongly suggest, as they can improve your life conditions. On the left, the “entities” that are more popular today. The best thing you can do is to move your focus away from these, and orientate it towards the entities at the right. Let’s see why.shift-from-finance-to-economy1. Shift your focus from finance to economy. When I was younger I used to say that “economy is terribly boring”. Today I find it very interesting and exciting. The problem is that, when I was younger, I was confusing the two things. What I believed to be the economy was actually finance. Unfortunately, this is still a common belief for a wide spread of the population.

There is an overexposure of finance in the media today, that keep on talking about banks, paper money, indexes and graphics, as if they were meaningful topics. But they are not. All these things are related to a parasitic financial estabilishment that adds no practical value to the life of people. Real economy, instead, is the science that studies the desires of people, and how people behave in the free market to meet these desires.

Free from the intervertion of governments and banks, real economy truly serves the desires of everyone. Once you shift your focus on it, you will not be distracted and conditioned by the finance uselessness anymore, and you will put your desires first.shift-from-religion-to-spirituality2. Shift your focus from religion to spirituality. The main problem with religions is that they are human institutions. While many of them are founded on spiritual principles, with time they have taken a detour. Consider that most religions are hundreds or thousands of years old. There’s been plenty of time for groups of power to distort the spiritual messages, so to obtain privileges and control over the masses.

Getting rid of religious dogmas is a necessary step to make room for something else. …what else? When people are unsatisfied with religions, their typical first reaction is to embrace materialism. In this stage there is the belief that science has all the answers. I went through it. At this stage you believe that humans, animals and plants are machines without purpose. Evolution is going nowehere. There is usually no familiarity with the concept of consciousness, and if there is some, then it’s reserved only to humans. Animals, plants, object, the planet, the universe, they’re all unconscious.

The step further, once you realize that this vision is limiting as well, is in a direction that I label as “spirituality”, for simplicity. At this stage you start to see less coincindences in the events that happen, and find more purpose instead. You understand that reality is a projection of the mind, and that the mind itself is not strictly closed in your brain, but it’s also outside of you. This is a very complex topic and I will not expand the discussion here, but I want to remark that shifting to a spiritual vision comes with great advantages: it increases the connection with your inner self, it makes you listen more to your intuition, and pushes you to work with determination to achieve your dreams. Because you know they are achievable.

To clarify how religion and spirituality are different, click here.

shift-from-diet-to-nutrition3. Shift your focus from diet to nutrition. I made an entire video to explain why diets don’t work. Diets are usually stressful and orientated to the short term. They rarely help you mantain an ideal weight for long. In addition, a serious problem is that typically the main focus of diets is not health, but “shape”. Diets are all about quantity (of calories), but they rarely concentrate of the quality (of nutrients).

It’s smart to stop worrying about diets and develop a knowledge about nutrition, instead. It will give you two crucial advantages. First, if you eat mostly nutrient-dense foods, you can basically eat as much as you want without getting fat. Second, this way your body and your mind will get the fuel they really need. This is especially important for the mind: I think that it’s a greatly underestimated fact that the foods we eat impact our mental clarity.

I advice to stop wasting time with diets and pay bigger attention to nutrition. If you don’t know much about it, start to learn. Nutrition is the absolute #1 impact factor on your health.

La freccia del complottismo

curva-del-complottismoSecondo me questa freccia rappresenta bene la distribuzione della popolazione nei confronti del “complottismo”.

Una larga maggioranza degli italiani è in zona gialla, cioè la zona in cui non viene neanche preso in considerazione che possano esistere versioni alternative dei fatti rispetto a quelle “ufficiali” dei media. Qui c’è un’ ingenuità diffusa, si tende a prendere per vera qualunque notizia e si è poco abituati a esercitare il senso critico. In questa zona c’è anche una seconda categoria di persone: gli scettici cronici. Quelli che, anche se vengono esposti a versioni alternative dei fatti -sensate e corredate di prove che dovrebbero far nascere parecchi dubbi-, sghignazzano e bollano sempre tutto come “cazzate”. Sono quelli che scrivono gombloddo! nei commenti dei giornali online, deridendo chi invece prova a farsi qualche domanda in più.

Poi c’è chi ha sviluppato un sano senso critico, nella zona verde. Questa è una netta minoranza. Qui c’è chi capisce che, in tantissimi casi, di complotti ce ne sono eccome. Le “autorità” diffondono delle versioni dei fatti, supportati da media compiacenti, che spesso sono evidentemente false se testate contro dei criteri di ragionevolezza. Chi ha maturato questa capacità di senso critico legge i giornali e, oltre a leggere la notizia, si chiede se il giornalista che ha scritto l’articolo vuole generare una reazione nel lettore, e se si quale tipo di reazione. Appartenere alla zona verde significa non farsi manipolare. Significa guardare un telegiornale e capire che dietro quell’ insistenza a proporre notizie di cronaca nera c’è il desiderio di controllare le masse con la paura. Significa vedere tantissime menzogne diffuse dalle “autorità” e riuscire non esserne condizionati.

E poi che chi sfora, cioè esagera e vede complotti dappertutto. Zona rossa. Chi pensa che ci sia il famoso nuovo ordine mondiale dietro qualunque cosa, chi ha teorie pazzesche sugli alieni, chi è convinto che ci sia un’ “agenda gay” e che le lesbiche non esistono perché, al contrario di quella maschile, l’omosessualità femminile è solo una moda (perla letta su stampalibera.com se ricordo bene), chi ha la mentalità imbevuta di paura e teme sempre di essere ingannato, schiavizzato, che prevede sempre guerre. Insomma… quelli che con la teoria del complottismo ci vanno giù troppo pesanti.

Però attenzione, voglio far notare una cosa: ricadere in questo estremo rosso è molto più raro che ricadere nell’altro estremo giallo. Io credo che oggi ci siano troppe persone che non si “dedicano” abbastanza al complottismo, troppe persone non si fanno domande. Il pericolo di non vedere abbastanza complotti è molto più concreto del pericolo di vederne troppi. Per cui io consiglio di farsi molte più domande, e soprattutto sviluppare la salutarissima arte di mettere in dubbio quello che dicono le autorità.