Contact Me

In the (somewhat unlikely) event that you need to contact me for some reason, feel free to send an email message to “webmaster” at this domain (“larabell.org”). Please also put the word “holycow” (in any combinarion of upper/lower case) in the subject line so I know the message is from a human and not a robot. This is not a foolproof contact method since the spam filters on that account are kept very tight. But, thanks to the relentless efforts of spammers, it’s the only way I can be contacted at the moment.

I recently tried to resurrect an updated version of my contact form but, despite my best efforts to weed out bot-driven spam, that is basically all I’ve gotten from the form so far. And it took less than 24 hours between putting the form online and when the spam started flowing. So, apparently, web forms are pretty useless for soliciting comments or requests from website visitors.

More recently, I decided to re-activate my Twitter account in the hopes that maybe I could keep the spam to a minimum and still be able to receive messages related to this website but, alas, the signal-to-noise ratio is way too low to justify leaving Twitter installed on my devices. You could try to find me on LinkedIn – I don’t log in there much but I do get notified if there are any private messages posted and the incidence of spam seems to be much lower there.

If you know of a robust solution that would allow arbitrary website visitors to reach me without my having to wade through mountains of spam, feel free to let me know via either of the methods above (and, if you’re touting your own product, adding “holycow” to the subject is very important since, in general, I will be deleting product announcements and advertisements with a vengeance).

Thank you for your cooperation.

It’s funny how, every once in a while, if you listen to the subtle messages unfolding around you on a constant basis, you pick up on a pattern of small bits of information that seem to build into something substantial. That happened to me recently on the general topic of effortlessness. Like many would-be adepts, I have a number of daily practices that I fit into various parts of the day. Sometimes they pay off with feelings of increased awareness or energy but, if I were being totally honest, most of the time they feel like drudge-work… a part of the day that occurs more out of habit than anything else… with the basic idea being one of consistency rather than joy.

I was listening to the latest Sam Harris podcast today and ran across an interesting take on something that should be familiar to most Western Ceremonial Magicians. Eric Weinstein was talking about finding meaning in license plate numbers as he drives around (don’t we all do that when we first start on the Path?) and the way he explained it was:

"...it's important to notice what it feels like to discern meaning where there is no meaning... it's important to get in touch with the "as if madness" experience in order to guard against madness; so I'm hoping to suspend my insistence on Truth for periods of time..."

I’m not sure about the connection with madness, per-se… and I’m wondering if that wasn’t just a ploy designed to wrap up the thought before getting interrupted. I realized when he said that that another good reason for discerning meaning where there is none is to prevent intellectual ossification (my term… it didn’t appear in the podcast, as far as I know). The belief that one particular way of looking at things must serve as the filter through which we see everything else from that point forward seems to be common in most philosophies and pretty much all religions. Adherence to a strict theology makes us less able to evaluate contrary ideas on their own merit. On the other hand, by constantly playing fast and loose with one’s synaptic network, so to speak, one might stand a chance of maintaining enough mental flexibility to recognize a true Epiphany when it finally does come.

It’s ironic that avoiding intellectual ossification was one of the main points that Sam was trying to convey just moments earlier… that there’s no logical reason to use one or more points-of-view which happen to have been elaborated thousands of years ago over new points-of-view developed by one’s own reason in the present time. Of course, that’s easier said than done and when most people start on any sort of Philosophical or Spiritual Path, they’re usually not capable of the kind of deep reasoning that would discern the “true meaning” of the Universe at first glance… so we may need to use ancient philosophy and religion as a crutch for a while… in order to bootstrap our thinking to the point where we can reason with some depth on the Universe and our purpose within it. But I expect that we all have to eventually drop the rhetoric and design our own systems based on First Principles.

I was listening to an interview with the authors of the new book The Distracted Mind on NPR this morning and they touched on a favorite pet peeve of mine that centers on a basic misunderstanding of the term multitasking. According to Wikipedia, the first published use of the term “multitask” appeared in an IBM paper describing the capabilities of the IBM System/360 in 1965. Is is only recently that the term has been used in the common vernacular to refer to the apparent ability of humans to “concentrate” on more than one task at a time.