Unsupported Speculation

Legally Distinct Inspired NOT-Rafki, dressed as a Yamabushi, out on a mountain walk, not made by me, but by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and I don’t know where they live.

There is this thing that happens when you walk for a long time. It is related to how our brain evolved to keep ‘Problem’-cognition as a positive-charge Left Hemisphere activity, but to default naturally to ‘Rest’-cognition negative charge Right Hemisphere activity. This is also related to how the sun causes the ground to change its charge back and forth from negative to positive throughout the day as the sun makes its passage.

To explain the latter briefly, as the sun passes through the sky, the charge of the ground goes to positive to negative three times. This is probably what sets up are natural circadian rhythms, which are NORMALLY understood to be when we feel like going to sleep, but since the charge of the ground rises to positive three times a day, this also establishes the times of daylight we are naturally shifted into Left Hemisphere thinking and work towards the solution of problems.

I started learning about this while out on mountain walks years ago, and that it was extraordinarily difficult to have a peaceful walk while also attempting to TRUDGE up a mountain. You see, the trudging itself naturally creates the mental circumstances of shifting into Left Hemisphere activity, and then a peaceful walk becomes practically impossible, and instead you end up MARCHING up the mountain to attempt to conquer it.

On a tangent, this ‘marching’ itself is precisely the same as what happens to Spring Cleaners after they’ve been cleaning the whole house for about six hours, and it sets up a very stable cycle of not being able to rest until every little dust mote and cobweb is removed. This is because walking for a long distance and spring cleaning are expressions of the same survival instincts to keep on working on a problem until it is fully resolved. That is because in a long ago past, virtually ALL problems were of the life or death sort, and so we all evolved this relentlessness towards ‘problems’, whether it was a dangerous person or animal, or the awareness that winter was approaching and we were concerned about resent game animal movements and our current stores of food.

And that is why it is hard to walk up a mountain peacefully. It CAN be done however, but you have to walk much more slowly and inefficiently than you may feel like, as well as stop in the shade for water and snacks, and keep your blood sugar up without crashing it. But a new idea that I’ve had that I’d like to try has to do with taking advantage of how the brain uses electrical polarity in order to emphasize either rest thinking or problem thinking, but to use in on walks with a walking stick.

To begin with, we evolved to be practically barefoot. This created contact with the ground, and to what was essentially always the negative charge of the ground. Two feet on the ground established a circuit-like flow up through the body into the head from one foot, and down from the head and into the ground through the other foot. This also established the speed that we could think, because thinking speed is only how many times charge in the spinal cord and brain stem successfully pulls electrical charge from one hemisphere and into the next per second.

It doesn’t matter if the ground isn’t negative, because a positively charged ground will just cause thinking to cycle in the opposite direction, and there will be no practical difference.

Now these ideas lead me to things that are hinted about in history, and it will sound silly, but think about various village elders and ancient shaman classes that walked with staffs. The staff itself was a symbol of authority, and even rapping the staff against hard ground was used stereotypically to get the truth out of lying stupid people. There are superstitions to be found back then as well, such as the concept of ‘bad’ regions of territory which was better to go around rather than walk through.

Long story short, I think the explanation for all of this is that early communities of people took advantage of their understanding of ground charges in order to keep themselves alert, as well as in the frame of mind they wanted to be in. I’ll give you an example, though this will sound embarrassingly dorky:

Imagine some village elder that has the duty as a member of some sort of decision-making council of other old people to walk around and check on how everyone else was doing. Making these rounds ensured that they were aware of the progress of various mutual projects as well as problems that had arisen.

While they walked around, they also knew that they could clear up some of the ‘drag’ of certain times of the day which causes the sun to make the ground have a charge that makes people dreary. Sooo, they just rapped their walking staff loudly every time they set it down while they walked.

What did this do? Since the charge of the ground was mostly uniform due to having enough time without being disturbed to cause the polarity of the atoms to be oriented vertically, either with positive or negative UP, then by rapping it loudly with a staff, it creates instant mixed charges in the ground, as well as added a light concussive effect from the sound of the staff hitting the ground, which itself caused the air atoms to spin turbulently.

What did THAT do? It made both the village elder’s mind clear, because of getting enough of both needed polarities of charges into the brain to be able to have more-or-less equal activation of both hemispheres, as well as left a trail behind them while they checked on the community that cleared everyone else’s mind as well.

This all reminds me of the concept in Japanese spirituality of a loud hand CLAP to heighten awareness, as well as their handcrafted Hyoshigi, which are two pieces of lacquered wood that makes a nice TONK when hit together. They also have these things which translate to ‘Deer Scarers’, which is a carefully constructed noise maker out of bamboo. Water fills one end of a large piece of bamboo through a straw, and then when the weight is enough, the large piece of bamboo tips downwards and tonks against a stone, when empties the water, and then the large piece of bamboo tips upwards again.

Anyway, I bought a nice walking stick. It is an English one. I looked up the conductivity of different types of wood, and saw that Ash is good that is also resilient enough to be used as a walking stick, so I bought one. When it arrives, then I will experiment with how it makes a difference preserving more of a negative charge while out on a walk in order to have a more peaceful one.

One last thing which I’ll just work in since it is hard to find a better place for it in this post. Spain used to have the cultural tradition of the ‘Siesta’. Yes, sadly the government of Spain abolished the practice of noon naps in order to boost the economy.

Spain is extremely arid, and this means in theory that when it came to the rise and fall of polarity of the ground throughout the day as the sun moved, then at around noon when the sun was the highest, then the difference of charge between the sky and the ground was also the strongest.

By taking a ‘Nap’, what those savvy Spaniards might have really been doing is using noontime to lay down on their sides, and then this created the fastest possible natural thinking speed, which was used however they wanted to use it.