3 X 5's: Index Card Wisdom from Best of Books

AI Marc Gafni (2025). Value is a Feeling and                                          Artifical Intelligence Doesn't Feel Gafni has a PhD in philosophy from Oxford and is an ordained orthodox rabbi. The book is based on a series of talks and is written in an "oral presentation" style. 3 waves of information technology are discussed: 1) social media, beginning in 2010, is designed to hijack user attention, track every keystroke and data input, place one into peer groups based on personal data, and sell this personal information to ad/marketing companies 2)AI catbot uses large language models to simulate huma conversation based on prompts the user provides, creating a "feeling" that one is conversing a real person that is smart, funny, and uses personalized language that shows an familiarity with one's specific interests and personality...ultimately appearing to con...

GIFTofTHERAPY Irvin Yalom (2002). The Gift of Therapy. Yalom is a medical doctor, a psychiatrist, and author of several books. He wrote this book at age 70, wanting to pass on learnings as 'tips for therapists' based on 45 years of clinical practice. He originally had over 200 tips and selected the best 85 tips for this book...there's much wisdom here...unable to summarize all 85 tips but i can share my favorites.  Note to self: reading this at age 65 with almost 45 years of teaching college, i too want to share tips for teaching/learning communication...perhaps a book someday entitled, gift of com. Note on tips: while these tips are designed for therapists, almost all of them can apply to interpersonal and small group relationships. Some of my favorite tips: one of the best ways to get to know someone is ask them to describe their typical daily routine --everything from the time they get up to the time they go to bed (in the therapeutic context, because of increased privac...

LOSE YOUR MIND Robert Sachs (2024). Don't Loose Your Mind:                                             Re-imagining Age and                                            Reclaiming the Place of Elder and Sage. Sachs has a Masters in Social Work and worked in hospice many years and trained in Tibetian Ayurveda; also, author of 9 books on physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. some of the demintia in age 50+ is due to polypharmacies--people 65+ average 6+ prescription meds--advice to review meds with a trusted MD to see what is really needed almost everyone could benefit from: more fruits and veggies  less processed foods and meat to age with grace, spend more: time with the young seek novelty cultivate music (listenin...

RECIPES Laura Archera Huxley (1963, 2021). You Are Not the Target. Laura was a concert violinist and therapist; here she presents 33 ways to inner happiness, or "recipes for living and loving." some starting points: feeling the energies in our bodies allows us to redirect and consciously transform the negative to positive energy a "recipe" is a method to test out in our everyday life...the recipe can be modified to suit the individual and/or circumstance   for practice, my 2 favorite recipes: you are not the target many times we experience negativity from others that is a consequence of a longer causal chain that has little to do with us personally, i.e., we are not the target! we can transform the negative energy by being aware of it and consciouslly contract our muscles (unobtrusive ones like abdominal, or leg, or buttocks...) 10 times quickly...in this way we beautify our bodies by redirecting the negative energy for a positive purpose (like strengthening our abs...

MARRIAGE Mary Balogh (2009). First Comes Marriage. This is the first of 4 books in the Huxtable series set in the Regency era of England. Elliot Wallace is Viscount Lyngate who visits a country village to inform a family that their younger brother is now the Earl of Merton...his 3 sisters follow him to London to learn the ways of polite society...one sister, Vanessa, offers herself to Elliot to save her older sister Meg, and Elliot accepts the marriage of convenience, and in time, they both learn about each other's pain, experience some healing, and begin to cultivate a loving relationship. Favorite quotes: "...only one thing at which he had excelled...He had loved. Always and unconditionally..." (p.4) "Perfection ought to be aimed for...even if it is not always possible to achieve. Anything worth doing ought to be done well." (p.226) "Life is good. Even when good people die far too young and older people betray us, life is good. Life is what we make it. We...

ROAR Don Campbell (1989, 2000). The Roar of Silence: Healing Powers of                                                           Breadth, Tone, and Music. While Campbell studied piano at a conservatory in France, i could not find any educational degree associated with his name, although some sources say he earned degrees in music from University of North Texas. He is the author of more than 20 books, including the Mozart Effect . In this book, he describes his life story and international music career that led to a health crisis and healing through music which became his passion, including drumming, singing, dancing, and music production. Each chapter contains content, meditation, and practice sections. One is encouraged to complete one chapter each week, performing the meditation and practice each day before moving on ...

TRANSFORMATIVE Ralph Metzner (2022, orig. 1997). The Unfolding Self:                                                              Varieties of Transformative Experience Metzner has a PhD in clinical psychology from Harvard and taught at the California Institute for Integral Studies for over 30 years. There is a summary journal article of the book published in 1990 called, Ten Classical Metaphors for Self-Transformation in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology . The sources for the book are east and west religion/spirituality, mythology, philosophy, shamanism, yoga, anthropology, transpersonal and depth psychology...he frames the work as "nonstatical research" and includes many stories, some personal, some from students, some from the sources above. Thesis: consciousness, the field in which thoughts, sen...