Quantum Crawfish Bisque For The Clueless Soul

168 Pages·2010·0.66 MB·English

Quantum Crawfish Bisque for the Clueless Soul:
How Choice Works To Create Success or Despair
by
Glenn J. Morris, Ph.D., Sci.D.

Copyright, 2009. Irena M. Morris. All rights reserved. No rights to
reproduction without the
permission of the copyright owner.
Quantum Crawfish Bisque for the Clueless Soul…………..Morris
Other Books, DVDs, Inventories, and CDs by Dr. Morris

CDs:
Meditation Mastery, a series of 8 CDs with over forty exercises
Bone Breathing Chi Kung and Meditation
Timed Meditations
Kundalini Awakening Process, only available through the KAP
Seminars
Earth through Wind Strategy and Chakra Meditations CDs for
Hoshin members.

Business Books:
Organizational Sync: Making Your Job Work for You
The Flexible Organization
Job Search: The College Graduates Guide to Getting a Job

Martial Arts:
Path Notes of an American Ninja Master
Shadow Strategies of an American Ninja Master
Martial Arts Madness

Videos and DVDs:
Teacher Training Videos for Hoshinjutsu
Cane and Hanbo Techniques
Knife and Pistol Defense
Rope and Chain Techniques
Short Stick and Pen Techniques
Pick Up Weapons
Grandmaster’s Energy Defense and Attacks
Hoshin Budo Meditation, Basic Massage, and Healing
Secret Smile at the Big House, CCA seminar.
Available at www.hoshin.com

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This book is for the enlightened, the protectors, the
wannabe seekers, and the needy to aid all with no
expectation. Enjoy the read. On a more personal level
thankyous are owed to Irena for her patience and
toleration while I worked on this project, Trish Walker,
and Lenora Rougeou for their suggestions and
kindness, Irena for the book cover, my readers in
calling for another book, and the senior ryu members
for reacting to various versions as I wrote.

-Glenn J Morris

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Quantum Crawfish Bisque for the Clueless
Soul……………………..Morris

CONTENTS

Proem/Introduction or “Ain’t rhetoric a kinda
question……………………………………………………….5
Understanding the importance of rhetoric as universal
strategy, soft science, and practice
is necessary for living well. Skip the intro if you are not
interested in applied scholarship.
The fun starts in Chapter One.
Chapter One: Natural or Not Natural
Selection……………………………………………………..18
Establishing the animal model for rhetoric hardly needs
white rats.
Chapter Two: Brains Over
Brawn…………………………………………………………35
We have four brains and ten chakra that influence sexual
selection, energy, dominance,
and other matters of importance and consequence.
Chapter Three: Religion, Social Control, and
Brainwashing……………………………………………….52
We tend to like what we learn first best. Interesting effects
of how information is
presented from St. Augustine to the web.
Chapter Four: What have Birds and Bees to Do with
Getting Laid?………………………………………………..72
The seven (or eight) kinds of lovers and other odd facts
about sex and gender in people.
Chapter Five: Problem Solving, IQ, and
EQ……………………………………………………………..93
Who is directing this three dimensional environment
adapting meat machine anyway?
Three tools of analysis that predict success in most
situations.
Chapter Six: Ghosts in the
Machine…………………………………………………….107

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Flight/Fight Response, Stress Management, and Aging.
Why you should pay attention to
nutrition, exercise, meditation, and stretching.
Chapter Seven: Budo versus
Basketball…………………………………………………120
What do we learn from sport that hinders our abilities in
combat and sometimes life.
Chapter Eight: Surviving Comfortably in a Complex
Society ……………………………………………………138
What you should understand about what matters that you
can’t do much about. Power,
social class, race, sex, and age.
Chapter Nine: Getting a
Life…………………………………………………………153
What you should understand about what matters that you
can do a lot about. Social
identity, nutrition, gender, sexuality, ability, communication
skills, and technology.

About the
Author………………………………………………………168

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“A graceful taunt is worth a thousand insults.” Nizer
“He has never been known to use a word thatmight
send a reader to the dictionary.”
- Faulkner on Hemingway

“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions
come from big words?”
- Hemingway on Faulkner

Proem/Introduction or “Ain’t rhetoric a
kinda question?”
No, it isn’t! Rhetoric is part and parcel to human
development and should be thought of as weaponry like
our brains. Understanding how rhetoric and science are
natural problem solving behavior in all sentient and some
semi-sentient animals helps us to understand that the
choices we all make in even the most mundane
circumstances can have life changing and threatening
impacts. Haven’t you wondered why some people seem to
always get what they want, and others who seem just as
worthy fail miserably? The difference often relates to the
ancient Greek skills of rhetoric or the more modern terms
social psychology and communication skills. Haven’t you
ever found yourself suspended over the coals or quagmire
due to some indiscretion, or fault, and searched mightily
through your repertoire of apology for the words that will let
you continue life unscarred and unscathed? Rhetoric is
high powered weaponry for the mouth as well as pen. If
you get it right you should never need that sword or troop
of bodyguards. Both men and baboons derive power
through the command of weaker fodder. The baboons,
however, sometimes, have to bark it up and survive to hold
the title of boss. Haven’t you ever told a whopper to
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impress someone, or embellished a story to make your self
look a little better to the discriminating listener? That’s
rhetoric too, working for the man on the street. I’ll warn you
going in, this book is a guide for the soul that is stressed
out in the daily struggles for survival in this concretized
jungle of virtual reality. If you liked my books Path Notes
(guided by Musashi and Sun Tzu) and Shadow Strategies
(Confucius and Chuang-tzu) and they made you think in
new ways, then this book should shake your tree of
creativity enough to make something gibber and fall out.

Lets take a test. We’ll do this with every chapter. Take a
test. See if you know and then fill in some of the holes.
True or False:

1. Rhetoric isn’t taught anymore?

2. Most people aren’t swayed much by advertising?

3. American politicians are too virtuous to use negative
advertising?

4. Rhetoric and Religion are not related?

5. Rhetoric has nothing to do with natural selection or
evolution?

6. Man is the only animal that uses or has a history of
rhetoric?

7. The classic educational system paid little attention to
rhetoric?

8. Rhetoric and government do not relate?

9. Leadership has more to with real skill than rhetoric?

10. In this modern age knowledge of rhetorical principles
will not help you get ahead?
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Rhetoric is often treated as a subcategory of
communication or information exchange dealing with
persuasion. Rhetoricians or rhetors are scholars who study
this subcategory in a disciplined and academic manner.
The surprising thing about rhetoricians is how often they
are killed by their governments or religious leaders. It is
dangerous to examine how we think we think and
persuade others, if history written by the winners can be
regarded as accurately presenting the lives and deaths of
the losers. It has often been pointed out by these hardy
scholars that during times of oppressive or authoritarian
government rhetoric becomes simply the exercise of formal
presentations (like the dumbing down of the Presidential
debates, after taking them from the League of Women
Voters), and during enlightened government is the hotbed
of dialogue and free speech where humans learn to excel
at persuasion (like the symposia, or hot hookup bars on
Friday nights). Like your hook up statements all of the first
test items are false. The psychologists claim that modern
human beings are allured by the hypnotic siren of
television into a state where suasion is too easy and the
bites of info thus delivered deliberately lead to short
attention spans and shallow thinking. Thus government
becomes more authoritative and thought less rigorous as a
product of technology not purpose or neglect so I mustn’t
talk down. Lets take a test and see what you know about
this media age in which we are all immersed. Read on at
your peril.

True or false:

1. Psychology was invented by Sigmund Freud.

2. The American Indians have contributed little to our forms
of government.

3. The average attention span continues to rise with our
IQ.
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4. Music is its own language and has little or no physical
effects.

5. Word choice is a function of vocabulary and has nothing
to do with financial success, gender identification, social
structure, emotional response, or status.

6. America produces more televisions than any other
manufacturing country.

7. The average male claims to be more sexually active
than the average female.

8. The average person seldom lies so most conversations
are truthful.

9. Religion is the arbiter of morality or definer of the good.

10. Theories like evolution can be considered a form of
science fiction.

How do you think you did? All of the above but number
seven are false and since most people lie more often than
they brush their teeth that one is difficult to verify beyond
the paper and pencil. This book will give you a number of
tools to help you make choices that lead to success as
normally defined and whatever personal twists that give
you pleasure. In Ancient Greece and Rome people who
wanted to be successful studied with rhetors or
rhetoricians as they taught the skills for being both good
and powerful in what we would consider brutal times. The
times can still be brutal, but who teaches power and isn’t
goodness debatable? Modern rhetoric can be described as
being more concerned with how and why a message is
constructed as well as its content for achieving an
expected result. Aristotle noted that the way we persuade
ourselves is very like how we persuade others and
defined rhetoric as the art of finding all the means of
persuasion in a given situation.
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Most students of persuasion or rhetoric have focused on
the persuasion of others to the detriment of developing
tools for self- persuasion but it is these skills necessary for
making good choices that result in creativity and
leadership. Sartre, a modern rhetorician whose existential
thinking was forged in the disappointments of French
actions during the German invasions of WWII came to the
conclusion that choice is the keystone of character. The
choices we make reveal the men and women that we are
and “shoulds” have little value when facing the deaths of
one’s Jewish or freedom loving friends. This position was
also held by Aristotle (exiled by the Athenians in his old
age), Cicero (murdered by the imperial guard under Marc
Anthony’s orders), and Kirkegaard (a contemporary
Christian existentialist who wrote about ambiguity building
faith safely past the reach of the Inquisition).
Unlike poetics, rhetoric concerns a specific communication
for a specific audience in a given situation that allows for
the examination of specific motive and examination of
result that can differ from universal appeals and audiences.
Rhetoric is a pragmatic tool and can be considered
mightier than the sword as it is often used as a form of
weaponry for seeking advantage. Persuasive speaking,
simple conversation, writing, painting, graphics, film, song,
dance, theatre, performance, music, photography, any
representational art can be examined and enhanced
through an understanding of rhetorical principles. Hitler
understood this and attempted to pervert the Olympics
through spectacle following the Roman concepts of visual
rhetoric. Churchill responded with his radio talks, copied by
FDR, and later Jimmy Carter. Churchill’s speeches during
the Battle of Britain and use of Beethoven’s Fifth as a V for
victory signature fired the hearts of the allies during the
war’s darkest hours. Churchill had a gift for words, his
“Iron Curtain” speech shaped British and American foreign
policy toward Russia for fifty years. It is the general
usefulness of rhetoric that attracts the critics’ censure and
the marketer’s praise. Propaganda is hardly the lowest
form of rhetoric and even today the military tosses out
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Trojan horses that they hope the enemy will drag into the
temples of their mind. Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric as
“the art of finding in any given situation the available
means of persuasion” was situational and modern enough
to be used and quoted for twenty three centuries. His
concepts concerning credibility are still used by many and
when added to the Roman Hermogenese’s stasis
questions we have tools to examine any speaker, and if we
add in Isocrates’ skills for developing good citizens, to
make one. Turning to the Roman pre-Dewey pragmatist
Cicero, writing for both lawyers and citizens, we can be
schooled in creating arguments and recognizing fallacious
thought. Cicero also forecasts James’s “conversational
quality” by warning against over indulgence in stylistic
devices. Quintilian admonishes his students to be careful
to select words that best express thought and posits that
only a good man can give a good speech (He did start
them very young.). Does this spur Longinus to seek the
sublime or echo Protagoras and the sophists to measure
the higher end of all things? The ancients were into this
stuff for good reason. They lived in brutal times where
force of arms, and desire for security by the noble or
wealthy often became the favored law of the land. Mark
Antony had Cicero killed because he made people think
about their lost freedoms when Rome went from
democratic republic to Imperial Rome under Julius Ceasar.
In the Renaissance the humanist rhetors Petrarch and
Erasmus studied Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian.
Considerable attention was paid by Pico to the Hermetic
writings of the Greek and Egyptian mystics as well as the
Hebrew Kaballah (way before Madonna and the Hollywood
crowd). Their and his intention was to shape personal and
civic advancement through occult knowledge and practice.
Were they laying the masonry for a New Age rhetoric,
similar to the Scots and Augustine shaping rhetoric to
evangelize the Christian faith? While the popular thinker
Descartes avoided the Inquisition with a circular defense of
Yahweh and logic, Vico postulated that history and
imagination provided as rigorous a methodology as logic
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