(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)

Matthew Redmond, Stanford University

(THE CONVERSATION) Since her death in 1886, Emily Dickinson has haunted us in many forms.

She has been the precocious little dead girl admired by distinguished men; the white-clad, solitary spinster languishing alone in her bedroom; and, in more recent interpretations, the rebellious teenager bent on smashing structures of power with her torrential genius.

As the world continues to endure the ravages of COVID-19, another ghost of Dickinson steps into view. This one, about 40 years old, seems by turns vulnerable and formidable, reclusive and forward. She carries the dead weight of crises beyond her control, but remains unbowed by it.

It was while drafting my dissertation, which explores the meaning of old age in America, that I first encountered this Dickinson. She has been with me ever since.

The depths of loss

Most admirers of Dickinsons poetry know that she spent a considerable part of her adult life in what we call self-imposed confinement, rarely venturing outside the family homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts. Less known, perhaps, is that the final 12 years of her life were passed in a state of nearly perpetual mourning.

It began with the death of her father. For all his stern comportment, Edward Dickinson had enjoyed a special relationship with Emily, his middle child. When her surviving letters declare him the oldest and oddest sort of a foreigner, one hears the affectionate annoyance that comes with real devotion. He died in 1874, away from home.

Loss followed loss. Favorite correspondent Samuel Bowles died in 1878. With the passing of Mary Ann Evans, otherwise known as George Eliot, in 1880, Dickinson lost a kindred spirit a mortal who, in her words, had already put on immortality while living. A very different loss was that of Dickinsons mother, Emily Norcross Dickinson, with whom she enjoyed little or no rapport for much of their life together, but who became at least somewhat precious to her daughter on her deathbed. That was in 1882, the same year that took from her literary idol Ralph Waldo Emerson and early mentor Charles Wadsworth.

The following year saw the death of her cherished eight-year-old nephew, Gilbert, from typhoid fever, his illness having spurred one of Dickinsons rare excursions beyond the homestead. The year after that, Judge Otis Phillips Lord, with whom she pursued the only confirmed romantic relationship of her life, finally succumbed to an illness of several years and was wearily dubbed by the poet our latest Lost.

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Piling on

What impact did so much grief have on the mind of one of Americas greatest visionary artists? Her letters say little enough. Writing to Mrs. Samuel Mack in 1884, however, she frankly admits: The Dyings have been too deep for me, and before I could raise my heart from one, another has come.

The word deep is an arresting choice, making it sound as though Dickinson is drowning in a pile of dead loved ones. Each time she comes up for air, yet another body is added to the great mass.

This is characteristic of Dickinson. If her imagination shrinks from visualizing breadth, it thrives on depth. Some of the most captivating images in her poetry are piles of things that cannot be piled: thunder, mountains, wind. During the Civil War, she uses the same technique to represent soldiers heroic and terrible sacrifice:

In describing her more personal losses of the 1870s, Dickinson seems to imagine yet another pile of human corpses rising before her eyes. Or maybe it is the same pile, her loved ones added to the dead troops whose fate she kept contemplating to the end of her own life. Seen in this light, the Dyings appear not just too deep but unfathomably so.

Life after death

At the time of this writing, the pile of lives that overshadows our lives is 800,000 deep and getting deeper by the hour. Dickinsons imagery shows how keenly she would have understood what we might feel, dwarfed by a mountain of mortality that will not stop growing. The same anger, exhaustion and sense of futility were her constant companions in later life.

Fortunately, she had other companions. As recent studies have shown, Dickinson was the best kind of social networker, maintaining profoundly generative relationships by correspondence from the family homestead. Her poetic output, though greatly diminished toward the end of her life, never ceases, and its offerings include some of her richest meditations on mortality, suffering and redemption.

These words resonate in the current crisis, during which protecting the daily mind has become a full-time job. News reports, with their updated death tolls, erode our intellectual and spiritual foundations. All seems lost.

But if strain and sorrow are palpable in this poem, so is courage. Dickinsons lonely speaker chooses to express what she has felt, to measure and record the burden of loss that life has thrust upon her. Beliefs, once bandaged, may heal. And while no man has ever been bold enough to confront the deeper Consciousness that so many deaths expose within the human mind, the speaker will not rule out doing so herself. There is still room in this blighted world for the kind of visionary experience from which hope not only springs, but flourishes.

Living in the shadow of death, Dickinson remained enamored of life. This, as much as anything, makes her a hero of our time.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here: https://theconversation.com/emily-dickinson-is-the-unlikely-hero-of-our-time-144262.

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Emily Dickinson is the unlikely hero of our time - Huron Daily Tribune

The mind is a state of thinking and it is a soft copy, unlike brain which is a hard copy. Everyone has one mind but it has two distinct functions such as conscious mind and subconscious mind. The conscious mind is objective, the waking mind and on the surface, while the subconscious mind is subjective, the sleeping mind and the deep self. Succinctly, a conscious mind can be compared with a commander while the subconscious mind with a follower. Joseph Murphy rightly remarked, Your subconscious mind does not argue with you. It accepts what your conscious mind decrees. If you say, I cant afford it, your subconscious mind works to make it true. Select a better thought. The decree, Ill buy it. I accept it in my mind. Whatever the commander orders the follower does it. That means whatever the conscious mind feeds to the subconscious mind, the latter does it automatically. However, subconscious mind corrects whenever the conscious mind wavers from main goals and objectives.

Conscious and Subconscious MindExamples and Illustrations

When you learn swimming initially, your conscious mind is active to understand the tricks of swimming. Once you learn the art of swimming, it is transferred to your subconscious mind. Similarly, when you learn driving newly, your conscious mind is active to acquire the tricks of it. Once you learn driving, it is transformed into your subconscious mind. That means whenever you learn anything new, your conscious mind is highly active and after mastering, it is shifted to your subconscious mind to take of care it. While driving some people talk to their cell phones because they drive the car from their subconscious mind and speak through the phone from their conscious mind. That is the power of the subconscious mind!

Accomplish Your Goals through Your Subconscious Mind

Your conscious mind clicks off once you go to sleep while your subconscious mind is always attentive and never sleeps. That means your subconscious mind works both during waking and sleeping hours. It works round the clock without any rest. Hence, you must know how to give positive and healthy instructions to your subconscious mind to accomplish whatever you want. For instance, you can pass on your goals to your subconscious mind through repetition and it checks your conscious mind whenever the conscious mind deviates from your goals.

Heal Your Diseases and Illness

There are several advantages to your subconscious mind. When you want to heal any disease or illness, you can easily heal them. When you give clear and constructive instructions to your subconscious mind you can cure your disease or illness. There are cases where cancer patients survived due to their will power. There are cases where people overcame their illness without any medication. They are possible when you know how you can give clear and constructive instructions to your subconscious mind. For instance, when people suffer from cancer, they must instruct their subconscious mind 5 or 10 minutes going to sleep as follows: My cancer is curable and I am overcoming from my cancer. When someone has back pain, he or she must give instructions to the subconscious mind as follows: My back pain is easily curable. I am perfectly comfortable without back pain. I can walk well with comfort. I am able to lift weights without any pain. In this way, people suffering from diseases and illness must give instructions to their subconscious mind before going to sleep by customizing as per their requirements. They will be able to overcome their diseases, illness, and challenges successfully. A study shows that when we go to sleep our conscious mind clicks off and our subconscious mind clicks on, and begins to entertain itself during the rest of the sleep. What we did in our last 30 minutes we replay 15-17 times during the night.

Disease versus Illness

There is a difference between disease and illness. Disease can affect an organ or organism, and illness is the result of it. At times disease can occur to mind leading to illness. Illness is not feeling well. It is a kind of discomfort and tiredness. It is mostly the outcome of the disease. Both disease and illness are different. In fact, both are undesirable and indicate the symptoms of an abnormality in the system. In most cases, illness can be cured while in some cases diseases cannot be cured.

Give instructions from your conscious mind to your subconscious mind repeatedly that you will cure your diseases and overcome your illness. When you do so repeatedly, you will be able to heal yourself. Remember, you cannot live beyond your fixed lifespan by following it but you can live healthy, happily and peacefully.

Templates to be Happy and Healthy

Here are some messages you can give to your subconscious mind repeatedly: I am hale and hearty. I have control over my disease and illness. I can overcome them easily because they are only temporary. I get good from others because I do good to others. My biggest strengths are forgiveness and gratitude. I can overcome the disease and illness since I forgive others easily and forget the unpleasant events quickly. I was born to live a long and happy life. I was born to make a difference in society. Hence, I live longer to add value to society.

Understand the power of your subconscious mind to heal diseases and illness without any medication to keep you healthy and happy. Joseph Murphy remarked, Forgive yourself and everyone else before you go to sleep, and healing will take place much more rapidly.

Commentary by Professor M.S. Rao. Heres what youve missed?Worlds Best Business Schools.Worlds Best Hospitality And Hotel Management Schools.

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COVID-19: Heal Your Diseases and Illness with Your Subconscious Mind - CEOWORLD magazine

CO2 emission benchmarks

As a senior executive, youre likely aware of the many strategic opportunities and threats posed by AI. According to IDC, spending on AI hardware and software is increasing at a CAGR of 24%. AI-driven projects will rapidly become a substantial percentage of any companys investment in technology.

What you may not be aware of are the environmental impacts of AI. AI can contribute to your company's carbon footprint or if managed well, help reduce the impact your company has on the environment.

The issue of environmental sustainability is becoming a more critical issue to CEOs and boards as the finance world drives this change. Recently, BlackRock's CEO announced that his firm now has a core goal of investing with environmental sustainability in mind. Goldman Sachs has now made "sustainable finance" core to its business.

Additionally, at the Davos World Economic Forum, the International Business Council announced metrics and a framework for reporting on subjects that include environmental sustainability goals. The Big Four accounting groups and many of the worlds largest companies have signed up to account for (among other things) environmental impact.

It's becoming increasingly important to understand your company's environmental impact. As you will see, AI can play an important role. In this article, well explore the environmental impact of AI and how boards should approach oversight of this increasingly important issue.

AI Can Have A Substantial Carbon Footprint

AI-based systems are highly compute-intensive. They must process a great deal of data, expanding the need for servers and dependence on energy to cool data centers. The adoption of AI within a corporation will increase the company's use of energy.

According to one study by the University of Massachusetts, training AI models to do Natural Language Processing (NLP), can produce the carbon dioxide equivalent of 5X the lifetime emissions of the American car, or the equivalent of 300 round-trip flights between San Francisco and New York.

CO2 emission benchmarks

Source: SP Global

This example of CO2 emissions from AI is stunning and disturbing. It is a wake-up call for us all. However, before we put too much emphasis on these results, we need to look at the bigger picture.

This is only one study for a specific type of AI which is not commonly used. More representative training tasks produce relatively tiny amounts of carbon. However, just because the most common methods of AI today aren't significant carbon producers, doesn't mean they might not become serious contributors in the future. At this moment, few studies exist that help a company evaluate the carbon impact of AI.

What this study tells us is that we need to know a great deal more about the carbon footprint of all types of AI. The issue today is that we don't know. We might be producing a little; we might be producing a great deal, but we need to know. It is part of our responsibility to ensure we understand what is happening.

As senior executives, we need to ask for the information that is not being collected at this time by your AI teams. Without data about your AI carbon footprint, you may be creating a surprise reputational risk for the company once information about your carbon footprint becomes public.

Without data about the potential environmental impact of your future AI projects, you cannot fully evaluate your investment in any project. Now more than ever, the impact of AI on CO2 emissions needs to be a key element in your decision-making process.

Interestingly, Canadas Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms has recently released a tool designed to estimate how much carbon is produced in training machine learning models. This particular tool is a small step in the right direction. At this moment, few other tools exist. It will be incumbent upon your AI teams to either use other tools or create their own to address the boards questions about environmental impact.

As environmental sustainability becomes more important, we need a lot more information about the impact our company is having. We need to track and report on what is happening inside our company as it relates to environmental sustainability. AI has the potential to produce significant and impactful carbon emissions. AI also has the potential to offset or reduce those carbon emissions.

AI Can Be Used To Reduce Carbon Footprint

Companies should consider allying themselves with any cloud provider that is committed to reducing their carbon footprint, thereby reducing their own. Instead of focusing on major internal projects to reduce environmental impact, it's possible to shift a company's AI training and processing to a data center cloud provider that can do that for you. For example:

AI can be a net positive contributor to environmental sustainability in many industries. Here are some examples:

As you consider your industry, think about three areas where AI is likely to have an impact on environmental sustainability:

AI uses a great deal of energy, and most companies have no idea how to measure environmental impact. We should drive the discussion around the awareness and measurement of AI's impact on the environment.

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Environmental Sustainability And AI - Forbes

Wildflowers and springtime? They're the peanut butter and jelly, or cookies and milk, if you prefer, of our wonderful wilder world come March and April.

That said, many of California's most majestic wildflower displays don't arrive in the calendar's third and fourth month. There are the awesome desert wildflowers of late January and February, while in the mountainous peaks of the Sierra? Blossoms can open well into July.

Some recent visitors to Reds Meadow Valley found pretty proof of this on July 22, with "chest-deep" flowers adding color and cheer to their nature stroll.

If you plan to visit the area, please do check travel advisories and pandemic protocols before setting off.

Also? The summertime shuttle is not running in 2020, the one that departs from the Mammoth Mountain Main Lodge. Making other arrangements as to how you'll reach Reds Meadow and Devils Postpile National Monument is essential.

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Chest-Deep' Wildflowers Are Blooming in Reds Meadow - NBC Southern California