Tag Archives: Chauncey C Riddle

Think To Grow The Brain

Spirituality, , ,

Just like the body needs to be exercised, so does the brain. Back in the 1960s, Professor Marion Diamond’s classic book, ” Magid Trees of the Mind,”  demonstrated that we can grow neurons in the brain at any age. Thinking independently does that. Diamond’s work was so significant that they let her do the autopsy on Einstein’s brain.

Think Think Think

Nathan Eldon Tanner lived in Canada and became an apostle in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As a child, he went to school in a one-room schoolhouse. The teacher for all the grades began the year by saying, “You only need to learn three things this year.” Then he wrote on the blackboard, “THINK, THINK, THINK.” (By the way, our youngest son was given the name Nathan because of the great role model of Nathan Eldon Tanner).

Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Chauncey C. Riddle, has written a classic book entitled THINK INDEPENDENTLY. The best class I had in college was his Philosophy of Religion class, which taught us how to think. I am blessed that he has written the foreword for three of my books. We have become best friends over the years, and his brilliant mind knows how to THINK, which has been such a blessing to me.

Mind Exercise Ideas

While excess stress and oils containing linoleic acid kill neurons in the brain, daily mental exercises will grow neurons.

1. You can pick mental exercises that cause you to think that best suit your liking and your living situation.
Scripture memorization and/or study is a great way that exercise the spirit and the mind—bringing peace to the soul.

2. I see God’s Word to be of infinite depth. I also see His Word not just being the scripture cannon, for as Alma shares, “For behold, the Lord doth grant unto all nations, of their own nation and tongue, to teach his word, yea, in wisdom, all that he seeth fit that they should have; therefore we see that the Lord doth counsel in wisdom, according to that which is just and true.” (Alma 29:8) We can learn from all nations and cultures. One of the great blessings as an atomic-clock physicist has been my opportunity to travel the globe visiting other atomic clock facilities. I have taken the opportunity in doing so to study those cultures and their religions.

3. Then there is His Word coming to us by personal revelation; I seek that every day for we have His promise in Mathew. 7:7-8: “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.” And His promises are sure.

4. One may think of cross-word puzzles as a good mental exercise, and that is good, but limited in its reach. Reading and learning from the Lord and His Word and from others are my main sources.

5. My personal joke is to learn faster than I forget! I also do a few SUDOKU puzzles per day, and I don’t use a pencil but a pen, requiring me to keep track of all the numbers across the puzzle along with logic considerations as to where a number should be placed to fill in all the blanks.

6. I buy a “BIG SUDUKO BOOK 1,000 medium to hard” puzzles–available from Amazon. I also take the time for fun mental exercises to determine the factors for that particular puzzle’s number. For example, No. 360 = 2^3, 3^2, 5. If the number is a prime, then I look up its logarithm value, memorize it, and then write it in the book as a memory exercise. I have a mathematical table of the prime numbers to seven significant digits.

More Mind Exercise Ideas

7. God is the Master of all good disciplines—including math. Jesus asks us to be perfect like our Heavenly Father is perfect (Matt. 5:48), which includes math! Math can be and is fun. The Allan variance, for example, is the analysis of a set of numbers in a data set and determining the different colors of the variations in the data set that occur in nature and in devices we build. My other personal joke is, “The only thing that is constant is change!” Enjoy the ride; there are always waves and or bumps along the way. We can ask the Lord, “What can I learn from the challenge?”

8. In Professor Marion Diamond’s classic book, she shares that there are seven learning centers in the brain, and they are complementary, and I have added my perspectives as well. They are: 1) language, 2) math and logic, 3) spatial representation (3D), 4) (beautiful) music, 5) physical skills, 6) interpersonal and intrapersonal skills, and 7) knowledge and learning of the grand harmony of nature—bringing you closer to the Creator.

9. For example, riding my bike combines 5) and 7) and is also an excellent eye-exercising opportunity. I listen to the Book of Mormon in French, and that combines 1) and 5). If one does crossword puzzles or Sudoku while listening to beautiful music, then that helps augment memory as well.

10. There is a well-known Mozart effect that was developed in Boulder, Colorado, several years ago and shown to be effective. For example, if one is learning calculus while listening to Mozart, then the retention increases. Our oldest son, Sterling, wanted to memorize Isaiah 52, and he composed it to music. He did the first half back in 1993, and twenty years later, he shared that composition with us. His retention was perfect.

11. For those who can play the piano, Terri Pontius gave me a great suggestion. Sight-reading pulls the right and left sides of the brain and is a great brain building exercise. On sight singing music would have the same benefits. For those who can’t read music, if they hear a song they like and then sing it, neurons will grow in their brains, and they will be blessed as well.

12. Dr. Dharma Shing Khalsa recommends at least a couple of hours each day doing some form of mental exercise. This is especially valuable for older people. He says that, “Studies have shown that when people do engage in moderate pleasant forms of mental exercise, it increases not only their knowledge, but also the efficiency and power of their brains.” The best retention occurs when there is cross-fertilization among these seven areas of the brain. Wisdom also grows with age, being helped by doing mental exercises.

13. While we are growing neurons in the brain, let us avoid those things that kill them. Again, that is excess stress and processed foods using linoleic acid. I wrote a blog article discussing that in detail: Don’t Kill Your Neurons. I highly recommend you read it if you haven’t.

Sharing His Truth

The blessings of thinking on the Lord’s Word are love, joy, and peace to the soul. As we do so, Light and the Truths of God are our reward. Then, as we lovingly share His Truths with others, we are doubly blessed. And the magic is that as you do these exercises for your brain you can sense new neuron growth.

In the ideal ZION society, which is coming soon, we lovingly share our individual thoughts, words, and deeds, which are unique to each of us, to bring about a Oneness with the Lord. “And the Lord called his people ZION, because they were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness; and there was no poor among them.” (Moses 7:18)  “Therefore, verily, thus saith the Lord, let Zion rejoice, for this is Zion—THE PURE IN HEART; therefore, let Zion rejoice, while all the wicked shall mourn.” (D&C 97:21)

David W. Allan
Photo. Pixabay

We Do Not Know Much About Ourselves

Spirituality, ,

Building A Testimony of Christ

Guest Post:  We humans do not know much about ourselves. The things we really know are the familiar things we repeatedly observe. However, most of what we believe, at any given moment, we do not observe, such as our belief in Europe or the Far East. We also have built a fabric of beliefs about many things we do not now sense or perceive, and we live our lives in this web of present knowledge firmly located in a web of present beliefs.

Chauncey C. Riddle

Knowledge and Beliefs

So we have at least two kinds of ideas: Things we presently perceive (our knowledge) and the web of beliefs, which gives meaning and reality to the imaginations in which we hold all of our present perceptions.

The Greeks called these two kinds of ideas physics (the things we sensorily perceive) and metaphysics (the unseen reality beyond the seen reality). It turns out that most of our important ideas about the reality of the universe are metaphysics, not physics. And metaphysics is the realm of faith, the things we believe but cannot prove, that gives understanding to the things we can see and prove.

Every normal human being has a metaphysics that he or she believes but cannot prove. Some people have better metaphysics than others, and this enables them to better predict the future and better explain what is going on in the realm of the things that can be seen. Since no one can prove that their metaphysics is correct, we may conclude that every human being lives by faith in something and that something is their metaphysics. Faith is trusting in something you cannot prove.

Not All Faiths Are Equal

Not all faiths are equal. Some are much better for helping the believer to get what they want than others. Politics is largely the activity of trying to affect the faith of other persons in order to gain power for the politician. Much of so-called general education in colleges is the attempt to enlarge and control the faith of others to affect their politics.

Every charismatic political leader is adept at manipulating the faith of other people.
But to the main point of this discussion: Faith of all kinds and for all persons is built by sequences of choices. Each normal human being lives by faith in a metaphysical structure he or she has built and maintained through daily choices.

The Heart Controls Choices

I assert that each of these choices is controlled mostly by the heart and not the mind of the individual. In other words, people believe and act as they want to, and they adjust their metaphysics to justify what they want and want to do.

What is the evidence that the heart and not the mind controls a person’s metaphysics? Just watch as smokers deny that smoking is harmful. Many know the rational evidence that smoking is harmful, but because they want to smoke, they disregard that evidence and smoke anyway.

Many know that deficit spending by the government is bad for the country, but they support it anyway because they want the short-term benefit that it brings. Many know that stealing is wrong but do it anyway because they want to, etc.

What about Faith in Jesus Christ?

Now the real point of all this is that faith in Jesus Christ is not for everyone because many just do not want to be like Christ. So they do not build a metaphysics that allows Christ to redeem them.

They would rather be like the non-believers and relish their favorite sins than to repent and become a blessing to all around them as Christ is. Some don’t mind being partly like Christ, but they trust in themselves to fashion a life that brings them all the satisfactions they desire rather than the pattern of the true Christian.

So the conclusion is that many people have all the evidence they need to fashion a solid testimony that Jesus is the Christ, but have no testimony of his divinity and power simply because they do not want to live the way he commends. They build testimonies or webs of understanding to self-justify their rejection of the moral standards Christ enjoins upon his faithful followers.

Building a Testimony of Christ

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is a moral test to all who hear or know it. Hearing about Christ from books or the testimonies of other humans is a partial test, but the full test comes only when the Holy Spirit bears witness to the individual that Christ is the only pattern of character which can be blessed with a fullness of knowledge and power unto all eternity, which is the only full salvation from this fallen world. As He said in the Sermon on the Mount, “Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man… (Matthew 7:24)” ‘les met en pratique’

P.S.  Guest post:  Chauncey C. Riddle is an American author, professor, and religious leader. He has written many articles for the Ensign, Sunstone, BYU Studies, The Encyclopedia of Mormonism, Deseret Language and Linguistics, and FARMS. He is also the author of the book, “Think Independently“ and countless articles and essays. He wrote the Foreword for both of my books: “It’s About Time” and “Time & Eternity, the End-Times & Beyond Revealed.”

 

Optimum Living and Fullness of Joy

Spirituality, ,

David Allan Time And EternityA Brief Introduction To The Book

We can think of the Earth being like a space-ship traveling through time and eternity, and we are now at a critical juncture in the sufferings and challenges of mortality–a juncture that will bring about the end of worldliness, as we enter into the glorious millennial epoch.  Most importantly, I share how the ideal society (Optimum living and fullness of joy) will come out of the denouement our Lord has prepared. It is a book of hope and manifests the infinite love our Heavenly Father in His perfect plan of happiness brought about by the infinite atonement of His Beloved Son, which has seven steps to it.

The Decline In Our Western Morality

Douglas Murray just wrote another bestseller, The War on the West, with 503 reviews on Amazon since 26 April 2022—82% five stars. Jordan Peterson just did a podcast with Douglas Murray about his new book. It is a very scholarly, but a godless perspective, on what is now causing the decline in our Western morality and why. Many of these same problems have already occurred throughout the world, as he points out in this new book as well as in his other books

Looking Through God’s Eyes

Within my mortal limitations, as a God-loving Christian, I choose to look through God’s eyes, as best I can, to know where we are in His timetable and the glorious future He has in store for the righteous who repent with full purpose of heart and come unto His Beloved Son. I share what we can best do now, and what the path forward looks like as our Savior leads us back to the Father in His “One-eternal-round” glorious chiasmus for His spaceship called Earth. The great suffering and enormous challenges we now see throughout the world will have an incomprehensible denouement for the end-times now unfolding and beyond.  This you will see described in the book.

Three Gospels

In Chapter Five, for example, I explain how the Lord has given us three gospels to best help us prepare for His glorious Second Coming. By the word “gospel,” I take the Greek meaning: “the good news.” I explain in detail how these three gospels are the most important things the Lord has given us to prepare for His coming.

1. The gospel of the good earth will help us overcome the pollution of the earth, and how to have maximum health in body, mind, and spirit.

2. The gospel of the Bible will help all who believe in our Lord and Savior make it into the millennium where He will gloriously reign for a thousand years as King of kings and Lord of lords.

3. Then all who accept and live the fullness of the gospel will be delivered by the Son to the Father at the end of the millennium into celestial realms of glory–and into optimum living and a fullness of joy.

Because of my work with atomic clocks, I see the optimum living opportunity in a Zion society as like an ensemble of such clocks. Like people, each clock is different. Each clock has different time and performance characteristics. I believe the Lord gave me the algorithm back in 1968 to optimally combine the readings of an ensemble of atomic clocks (like an ideal society) so that the characteristics of each is fully utilized. This optimally combined ensemble then generates a time that is better than the best-contributing clock, and even the least of the performing clocks enhances the output. Just like in a Zion society, the time and talents of each individual are optimally used to help in bringing perfection to the whole of that society. As we learn and grow, the whole becomes better, because everyone is motivated by the pure love of Christ.

With improvements by my outstanding colleagues, that algorithm (AT-1) is still ticking today to provide official time for the USA. It is continually getting better as the contributing clocks get better. Timing accuracy has improved a billionfold in my life. AMAZING!

So in contrast to the worldview, which sees the world spiraling down in moral decay, my book is filled with hope and divine resolution—denouement for the world play in Father’s perfect plan of happiness in spite of all our imperfections.  The infinite atonement of our loving Lord and Savior is open to all who repent with full purpose of heart and come unto Him. My book also helps those who have lost faith; we see atheism increasing, and my book is a counter to that.

C.S. Lewis

As I share in my previous book, It’s About Time, C. S. Lewis during his teenage and apostate years, felt that the strongest force for atheism was expressed in a poem by Lucretius:

Had God designed the world, it would not be A world so frail and faulty as we see.

After J. R. R. Tolkien and others of his friends, persuaded Lewis to deeply consider Christianity, it turned his life around. As he considered Christ, he came to the conclusion that “only two views of this man are possible.

“Either he was a raving lunatic of an unusually abominable type, or else He was, and is, precisely what He said. There is no middle way. If the records make the first hypothesis unacceptable, you must submit to the second. And if you do that, all else that is claimed by Christians becomes credible — that this Man, having been killed, was yet alive, and that His death [and His glorious resurrection], in some manner incomprehensible to human thought, has affected a real change. . . in our favor.”

After gaining his deep appreciation for Christianity, in regard to evil, pain, and the suffering that comes with life, Lewis poignantly states that if you “Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free will involve, . . .you find that you have excluded life itself.” He goes on to say, let us get on with living the two great commandments. (Matt. 22:36-40)  If all would do that, we would have the optimum living. It is my hope and prayer that my new book will do that–sharing the incredible promises the Lord has in store for the faithful and the righteous. His love is infinite.

David W. Allan

This new e-mail address is being provided for you to contact me. I appreciate feedback (Questions or Suggestions): gospelquestions7@gmail.com 

My book’s website now has over 116,000 visits per year and increasing from over 100 nations. It is my gospel outreach, and I am pleased to be able to share God’s love for His children. You can buy my book at the following link in hard copy, kindle, or in audio format: https://itsabouttimebook.com/purchase-its-about-time-book/

My new book is now being edited and can be preordered:

Time and Eternity: The End-Times Revealed and Beyond, Digital Legend (digitalegend.com)