Crossing the Seas: A Diary of My Thoughts

Copyright © 2010-2012 Yuehai Xiao

On Demystifying Dictators and Cult Leaders

What is more powerful? The armies or the thoughts? The guns or the pens? What matters more-- the skin or the mind?

It seems that the ultimate power lies in words and thoughts that transform people's mindset, their actions, and their life -- either towards the wrong direction or the right direction. When people are brainwashed by cult leaders, dictators, or militant leaders, they mistakenly believe that they are fighting for a righteous and noble course. One example can be the suicide bombers. The reason that they are willing to give out their lives is because they are brainwashed. In contrast, strong leaders can win people's hearts and minds, motivate people, and bring peace and prosperity to people through their words, thoughts, blueprints, and effective policies.

To cover one lie, you need to come up with at least 10 lies because one question leads to another when people are trying to find out the truth.

Dictators and cult leaders are liars who brainwash their followers. It is not very difficult to reveal the truth to their followers and wake them up. If those followers could wake up, the world would become a better place. One way to do that, is to review the books and remarks of those dictators and cult leaders.

Dictators like Hitler and those in North Korea are just like cult leaders in a sense. They need to be treated like God in order to rule. They mystify themselves with propaganda. In addition, they always come up with lots of excuses and lies to mislead people for their own purposes.

The biggest enemy of the people in North Korea is not America or vice versa. Interestingly, both North Korea and America share the same enemy-- the dictator who brainwashed North Korean people to fight against America and to keep themselves isolated from the outside world. Those people are not able to tell what truth is because they have no access to any information other than the information controlled by the government.

Military expenditure can be trillions of dollars and a higher price to paid is thousands of human lives. Hopefully someday, the boundaries between countries will blur, just like the EU.

If we could demystify the cult leaders, dictators, emperors, and autocracies, we might be one step closer to world peace. Other than that, tolerance of differences is the key to world peace, I think.

On Information Processing

We learn from one another: from our leaders, teachers, parents, friends to our employees, students, children, and even our enemies...

Critical thinking skills, creative thinking skills, and the ability to innovate are much more important than the rote knowledge learned by heart, because these skills and ability constitute the core competitiveness of an individual, a company, or even a country.

The understanding of the roles of our cognitive processing and how people learn new knowledge might potentially lead to educational reform and innovation, which might have far reaching impacts on lots of kids and adults.

To process information is more important than to store information. As a result, the processor of a computer is more important than its hard drive. The same might be true with regards to human brains.

Instead of helping our clients improve the "hard drive" capacity of their minds , namely, the amount of knowledge, we strive to help them upgrade the"CPU" of their minds, namely, the information processing ability and such skills as analytical thinking, critical thinking, logical reasoning, creative thinking, and problem solving.

The abilities to analyze and to create (which are what the processor of our brain does) are more important than the abilities to memorize. Spelling contests might mislead the children by sending them the message that memorization is all that matters. In fact, the spell-check function of MS Word is even more reliable than a spelling champion.

Also, it is easier to expand the hard drive (by adding an external hard drive) than to upgrade the CPU and processor.

It is harmful to accept "information" as "knowledge" without critical examination or analysis. That's why critical thinking is important. Critical thinking is one of the skills of the "CPU" of our brain.

With regards to learning history, I thought critical analysis of the causes and effects of landmark events was more important than memorizing historical facts and details, which could be stored on computers and easily retrieved. Since human memory is limited and precious, it should be reserved for the most important information.

Some Awakening Quotes

An immortal does not make any mistakes (coz he/she could have predicted them), does not get sick, get older or die. I guess no cult leaders or dictators qualify for that.

It is not easy, yet possible, to make heart-to-heart connection with one another, and foster mind-to-mind mutual understanding with one another. The longest distance, therefore, is not from place to place, but from heart to heart and mind to mind. We may fly to any corners on the earth within 24 hours. Yet it might take a long time to reach some people’s hearts and minds.

To imply is to offer alternate or secondary interpretations of an utterance (or a message, a song, a photo, a video clip) through the connections among the texts, the cognition, and the context of it.

Goodman (1967) argues that reading is a psycholinguistic guess game. Perhaps this observation can also be extended to interpersonal communication. Isn’t reading people’s mind essentially a psycholinguistic guess game? Reading a mind is no less complex than reading a book. Reading a book can be viewed as meeting with the author mind to mind. Both are ways of communication by nature. And in communication, meaning is negotiated in the context and in the participants’ minds. If both of them are regarded as ways of communication (which can be either written or spoken or both), we might be able to draw a parallel between reading a mind in social life and reading a book in academic life.

In order to continue this Facebook show, the priority is to have a real platform or real recognition, funds, and team work rather than to come up with more stunning ideas, reviews or comments or to prove anything. A 2-year Facebook show with 300+ pages of thoughts and ideas that impressed top political,religious,business leaders, scholars, and celebrities across North America, Europe, and Asia, this is already a record.

I have no clue why some people would claim to be something they are not , such as an immortal, a Buddha, a prophet...etc while most of them can't even predict the answer key to an SAT test.

There are multiple dimensions of intelligence, such as verbal, math, music, vocal, dancing, sports, drawing intelligence...etc. Academic performance is just one dimension. Most IQ tests tend to measure verbal and math abilities only while overlooking other abilities.

In order to teach GRE/GMAT/SAT/TOEFL test prep effectively, the instructor needs to : identify the patterns, rules, and strategies for each type of questions in the test; articulate and explain them clearly to the students; and demonstrate the problem solving process of test questions through workout examples. Perhaps this approach is applicable to other skills and areas too.

Sometimes we just keep running, running, and running...Before we knew it, we are already running side by side with the top minds alive in the world and possibly even with those giants of thoughts in history.

When we are amazed at the talent of people, we are speechless at the wisdom of the creator.