http://gizmodo.com/5958877/secrets-sche ... f-darknessEye opening article. I've always thought of McAfee (or Norton) as being like the mob - fostering the threat, then selling protection. JM is an interesting guy because he has all that money! Reading between the lines in that article, I assumed that he likes to play - as he actively invests his stash?
Pretty cool guy!! But,
Treetop flying at
Rodeo was hot!! Too many hangers... Then the road down south was paved with good intentions... Altruistic? Aum.... A hundred million bucks buys a lotta drugs and lotsa p**sy! Who is using whom? And now they say the man is sinister. All washed up and nobody left to bribe? The South Pacific sounds nice. Another metamorphosis?
http://blogs.westword.com/latestword/20 ... s_yoga.phpJM: I think the problem with modern society is that we are glued to the television set. We are glued to the easy chair at home, and we are stuck in the habitual lifestyle -- commuting to and from work each day and then watching TV when we get home, and then we have two days off on the weekend and don't know what to do, so we watch TV again. Anything that gets people out of the house, in which the idea of something new is available, is a good thing.
WW: What makes relational yoga different from other forms of yoga?
JM: I think what's important is not the type of yoga; it's leaving the home and going out and doing something.
That's how I came up with observational yoga. It sounds like a ridiculous concept, but it gets you out of the house; it is simply doing something with your life rather than sitting around watching television.
WW: What is observational yoga?
JM: You can pay $200 a month to sit in an easy chair and watch people do yoga up on a stage. There is a scientific basis for this, that through osmosis, as you watch others be active, the observation of something impacts yourself. If you watch someone move in a certain way, you start to mimic that later in the day. A good example is if you watch a scary movie, you become scared. You are not being attacked, but somehow you feel the fear. It's very popular [in Belize].
It would be very difficult to sell this concept in America. I would be shut down on all the claims that it improved health by the government. But here I can make any kind of outrageous claim that I choose and the government can see fit to say that it is okay.
In all sincerity, would you rather go out and see the work or do the work? Watching work is a very popular concept. Have you ever been in a city and there is construction going on? They used to put round holes in the walls that divide the construction from the street, because people used to like to walk by and watch people working. It was a popular pastime.
WW: Is this your primary occupation right now?
JM: In Belize this is a minor hobby more than anything else, but it is quite popular. I am planning to franchise it.
WW: What do the actual yoga practitioners do?
JM: It's mostly hatha yoga in static poses -- like Iyengar yoga. People find it more interesting to watch. We are trying to do the same thing with weight training, where you sit in an easy chair, they serve coffee or juice, and you watch people lift weights. There is a scientific basis that it will affect your actions throughout the day -- that you may lift a chair later rather than just scooting it across the floor -- and there will be an increase in muscle mass and a decrease in body fat.
We have discovered that activities with large-scale movements (involving the whole body, for example) lend themselves more readily to observational techniques. Small-scale movements, such as typing, provide limited results. This is why we had no success in teaching people to play the piano by having them watch concert pianists at work.
... He's juz messin' with her... right!? You gotta like this:
http://adventure.nationalgeographic.com ... nes-text/2... McAfee's backcountry version of ultralight flying may or may not catch on, but if it does, it wouldn't be the first time the world has found itself swept up in one of his improbable schemes. It was McAfee who, in the late 1980s, informed millions (including me) that malicious "viruses" could infect and kill our electronic equipment. McAfee's ingenious protection software netted him $100 million by the time he sold his antivirus company in 1994. A few years later, he got into another new thing—instant messaging—and made millions more.
But with business success came the unwelcome creep of drudgery and responsibility. In what was to become a pattern of relentless self-renewal (and, some would say, selfishness), the entrepreneur shed his companies, divorced his spouse, and started teaching transcendental meditation and yoga. He wrote four books with titles such as Beyond the Siddhis: Supernatural Powers and the Sutras of Patanjali and The Fabric of Self—books McAfee now says he "wouldn't suggest that you or anyone else bother reading."
This sounds like the group here at RI:
http://adventure.nationalgeographic.com ... es-text/10...
With the ringleader's return, the desert party shifts into high gear. Around the fire are millionaires, rocket scientists, fighter pilots, and a pistol-packing gal from Georgia. More wrestling breaks out, and the conversation ranges from Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to sadomasochism to Milton Erickson's rapid-induction hypnosis techniques. The campfire talk flows fast and uninhibited, and the laughter is nearly nonstop—though no one has imbibed anything stronger than coffee.
I ask McAfee about his aversion to alcohol, even at times like this, when nobody's flying or driving. "I don't actually mind people drinking," he tells me. "I just don't want them doing it around me. With every drink, you lose 8 percent of your IQ. Once you quit, you start to notice that people get really stupid when they drink."
And yet, when I step back from the fire and look up, I feel giddy, almost stoned. Atop the high meadow, in the darkest corner of the contiguous U.S., it seems that I can feel the Earth spinning through the universe. I jokingly ask Ivashkov, the former hypnotherapist, if McAfee slipped some mojo into the meditation—then I add that I've always been one of those people who can't be hypnotized.
Ivashkov just smiles, and I notice in her green eyes the flickering dance of firelight. "Everyone," she says, "can be hypnotized."
...
http://adventure.nationalgeographic.com ... es-text/11... On my first day at the Sky Gypsies compound, during the meditation, McAfee had given similar instructions. "Let go of everything you know," he told the assembled pilots. "Forget all your knowledge and just…simply…experience."
I loosen up and let the wing find its own way through the air. In an instant, flying becomes much easier. I cascade up and down, practicing landings and takeoffs, then climb up toward the high peaks of the Chiricahuas. Combs forewarns me, then reaches down and cuts the engine, leaving nothing in my ears but the rushing wind. I glide between the mountains, experiencing the trike's wingtips as extensions of my own outstretched arms. It's not a bird I've become, I think, but rather the flying human of my childhood dreams.
So surreal is the experience that it occurs to me, as I turn my last lazy circles above the desert, that the past few days—the flying, the laughs, the desert world of cone-headed aces and blue-haired beauties and shape-shifting possibilities—might have been just one long, hypnotic dream sequence, a runaway unspooling of imagination.
Drifting down toward the airstrip, I think back again to that first day, to the moment when McAfee voiced the final note of his count-up to the meditation's end.
"Five," McAfee said, and in the dimly lit theater a dozen pilots opened their eyes. At the foot of the stage, the Sky Gypsies' leader came into focus, sitting serenely and watching his flock blinking and stretching and rubbing bleary eyes.
"OK," McAfee said. "Did anyone go anyplace interesting?"
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Inexpensive ways to fly:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultralight_aviationOpen Air/extremely mobile:
Power paraglider -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powered_paraglidingUltralight trike (or bike) -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultralight_trikehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaBwb28pUG8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0d9ayxS ... re=relatedhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_CreationEnclosed cockpit:
Light Sport Aircraft -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_Design_CTSWhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroprakt_A-22http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikarus_C42