“A human being is a part of a whole, called by us _universe_, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest… a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

Albert Einstein

In building on the notion that we attract the things we need to us by our intention as well as by our effort I want to lay out what I need or need to do in the next few years.

Finances

I need to pay off my student loan and to develop a strategy for saving. The loan is currently at 11 thousand US dollars at between 9 and 15 percent interest. It costs me 300 US a month minimum so paying it off will really free me to earn less or save more.

As for saving/investing I view the stock market as “legalized gambling” and not a viable option. The reason I don’t think it’s viable is two fold. First I really do think it’s as fake as fantasy baseball and as such have no trust that money put in will ever come back out. Second it seems to be based on the greed is good corporate philosophy of the last age and I don’t want to support this age.

So as of now I think investing means finding a stable currency to keep my money in, investing in gold and silver coins, investing in building personal infrastructure for myself and my family, investing in education, investing in green energy and contributing to wilderness conservation. Of all of these wilderness conservation is the most absolutely vital and something I would love to be able to pore money into.

Professional Development

I’ve added a couple of testing qualifications in the past year and hope to add an IELTS qualification in the next two months. These are the concrete steps I can take right now.

My hope is that I will also be able to return to school. First I’d like to attend the California Institute of Locksmithing, then either graduate school or the East West school of massage. The idea is to build up trade qualifications that allow me to work in the US before, during or after attending graduate school.

A master’s degree would be followed by a conflict resolution certification program. So that I should be well equipped to earn a significant and tax free or low tax income overseas. It would also equip me to begin a college teaching career at the community college level in the US or to continue immediately to a Phd program.

Social

I want to continue to invest time in my relationships. I value them so much and during the past year it has been the people I know who’ve kept me sane, legal and employed. I’ve also been able to help in a few instances and that brought me joy too.

I hope that this can also mean more frequent visits to the States or even a return as I feel the three years of separation acutely.

I also hope to continue to allow all of these relationships to grow so that we do not restrict each other. In my own case I hope that people will find me less judgmental, depressing and hard to be around than they have in the past.

Physical

I hope to continue the natural progress of the swimming, exercising and martial arts training I’ve been doing. I’m really happy with this work and feel that the only thing is to keep at it.

Summary

I hope and need to be a more stable, balanced and dynamic person. I think that this is the type of person who will be able to help, themselves and those around them, and helping is at least half of the point of living.

What kind of person do you hope and need to be?

I’m changing stages in this project of mine. I still welcome the discussion that, I’ve wanted from the start, I still suggest that people go back and view the primary documents which helped to inspire this journey but I’m moving beyond that.

Part of the reason I had for putting forward the documents is that I wanted a discussion of the various perspectives contained therein. I felt that this was the most equitable way to move toward an accurate picture of our lives today. That has not happened so I’m doing the next best thing, I’m going to put forward my vision of our situation and I’m going to do so as tersely as I can. As you read please keep in mind that every single thing I mention has multiple layers.

Working Conclusion 1

Every thing we are capable of perceiving and every thing we are not capable of perceiving is part of the continuous web of life/tao/God. We are all one and we all have a spirit. At the atomic and subatomic levels we’re the same, spiritually we’re similar (vibrating at different frequencies) and to the senses we’re very different.

When we understand this and live from the truth of it we understand that there is no other to contend with, no away to throw our garbage too, no heaven to aspire to or hell to fear. This is the essential understanding that lies within all religions and that has been for centuries obscured by the overwhelming majority of religions groups.

Indigenous people generally have a far better grasp on this truth, their lives reflect their understanding and act as a lesson. As such they’ve been systematically discredited (where not murdered outright) this is true from the British Isles to Papua New Guinea from New Zealand to Haida Gwai.

Working Conclusion 2

There is no such thing as evil in the sense that we have understood it. All beings are acting from their best understanding, from the Dalai Lama to thoughtless drivers to government trained killers to asshole soccer moms to Barack Obama to Sarah Palin to the proganda writers in China and at Fox News to otters cracking open shellfish to Coastal Redwoods to Adolf Hitler, all beings are acting from their best understanding.

We all act from our best understanding, we all have perspectives and limits, some of us have some pretty beautiful understandings others pretty horrific understandings yet we’re all on the same spectrum. We’re acting from our best understanding and we mean well.

Working Conclusion 3

The amount that we don’t know is beyond imagining. It is best to assume that even the craziest “myths and legends” contain something of the truth and that even the most incredible technological advances we’ve read in comic books or seen in sci-fi movies are with the realm of possibility.

Working Conclusion 4

The vast majority of people are walking around deaf, dumb and blind without any awareness or understanding of even their own body or mind. Yet we’re all capable of waking up, we’re all capable of exceeding our own expectations, far exceeding them.

Working Conclusion 5

There is more possible now than there has been in our lifetimes or the lifetimes of our parents and grandparents. Life is constant change, constant creation and destruction, much like the ocean is never without waves. We’re about to see some incredible surf.

Working Conclusion 6

We are co-creators of reality. We’ve all experienced things like the difference between a fun working environment and a miserable one, we know that attitude shapes experience on this sort of level. The thing is that the clearer our minds are, the more connected we are in body, mind and spirit the more able we are to shape not only our experience of reality but reality itself.

I will tell you know what Carol Heaslip told my 太極拳 class twelve years ago. The parenthetical remarks are my own understanding the rest is paraphrased from distinct memory, “When you understand this art (meaning when you understand yourself) you can ask for what you need and it will come to you. It must be what you need, you cannot just ask for what you want and you cannot ask for others to be harmed, because that’s the dark side (and it will destroy you).”

She said this to us, as we were getting ready to leave class, some had already gone. Then as if to prove her point one of the group mentioned needing a couch and Carol said, “I’ve got one I don’t need and sometimes that’s just how fast it works.”

I labeled these working conclusions to reflect that they’re the best understanding I have now. I numbered them as I wrote them, though I’m not certain that the way they’re written is the best way to read them.

Peace

I’ve added a page called fundamentals which will be used to break down the fundamentals of various topics. I started with religion and hope to do a teaching one soon.

Also I’m working on a long project related to basketball which I’ll be giving a page as well. Hope you all enjoy.

In starting this series of full disclosure posts I’ve opened something that cannot be closed again. At times when people were giving me negative feedback or worried about my mental health I’ve wondered why I opened this discussion in the first place because is seemed to be more trouble than it was worth.

I wanted to get discussions going on these issues so I provided an assortment of media for people to review. The response has been surprising to say the least, I only asked people who I figured where ready to get into this with me but other than Yusef’s posts there has been little response. I felt at the time that Yusef was purposely trying to shape the discussion so that it would move away from the issues I wanted to get at. He openly admitted to not finishing any of the video’s I’d recommended.

Others have promised to check out the videos but few have followed up on that. Maybe people have started their own exploration and maybe they haven’t I don’t really know.

For me it’s been a life changing experience and these changes are already proving to be a combination of life enhancing, life extending and life saving. I continue to share my thoughts and experiences because I enjoy doing so and in the hopes that it is valuable to others.

I’ve related my efforts to prepare and stock a go bag. And I feel reasonably good about the steps I’ve made to cover myself in regards to having proper identification and proper backup copies.

I’ve also begun doing more body weight exercises. The goal is to have a full set of exercises that I can do with my own body in nearly any setting and to understand these exercises. I hope that I’ll eventually be able to give up the expense and hassle of a gym membership without reducing my level of fitness. A fit, flexible and healthy body allows us to enjoy the good times and gives us a better chance of surviving the bad times.

I’ve also been looking to change my diet. I’m currently reading up on salads and macrobiotic eating. This is a more complicated area so it’s taking longer to learn but that’s fine, little steps are still steps.

I already drink filtered water and I’m currently looking at filters and methods of purifying water because clean water is a vital resource for healthy living. It’s also my favorite drink. Hoping to find a filter that removes fluoride which is a poison commonly put into American water supplies.

Financially I’ve made tough decisions not to take vacations that I wanted to, I’ve also taken on more work and I’m going to do my best to sell the new bike I purchased last fall. It would have been nice if I’d been smart enough not to purchase it in the first place but I learned a lesson and I’m moving on.

I haven’t been able to take the next step toward making investments but I’ve been reading on this subject as well trying to learn about investing in precious metals and green energies. I’d also like to get out of American Dollars, as I don’t think they’re really a viable currency any longer. [Dollars aren’t backed by anything and are issued by a private institution not the government of the United States of America.]

During a conversation with a Christian friend of mine she related her belief in a spiritual realm and a continuing war between the Devil and his fallen angels and God. She referred to it as a war for our souls. I asked her what we can do about this war and her answer was, that we can pray.

My understanding is not her understanding but it is not very different either. I look at things this way, when we use our intuition, heart and reason to make a decision we generally make decisions that are to our benefit and to the general benefit of the world. We will certainly make mistakes from time to time but we do well enough and we continue living and learning and having fun as we go.

When we’re cut off from using our intuition, heart and reason the quality of our decisions plummets. In this situation we make decisions that cause more harm than good, sometimes even intentionally.

So it’s the question of whether we’re bringing our full human capacities to our decisions or not that concerns me. The so-called war is, in my understanding, a war for control of our consciousness / decision making faculty. I could explain how I view this but it’s better if you all just spend a few days living with the idea that forces are trying to control your consciousness to their own benefit. Look at this from different levels and angles and perspectives, and then you’ll have your own understanding.

While my view of “war” is somewhat different from my friends I do pray and I act. I do not have all the answers about money or diet or secret governments or spiritual realms or next week’s lotto numbers but neither am I standing by passively. I’m talking about these things to people, I’m taking the steps I can, I’m planning so that I’ll be able to take others and I’m not spending any time being afraid.

I got mad at my kids class tonight. They were arguing in Chinese, not paying attention, whining, trying to steal reward cards and mumbling when they read. They all know better than that, they know that this sort of behavior irritates me. They know we have more fun when I’m not irritated so I always wonder why they can’t behave.

But thinking about it more they’re very much like humanity in general. We do so many stupid things that we know are stupid; stupid because they make us sick or cause fights or run up our debt or pollute. Why aren’t we any smarter than the kids? Why aren’t we all smarter?

Mandy and I went to Gordon Biersch on Sunday. We both ate meals that were too large for us, too salty and too expensive. I saw a family of white people (they looked like Americans) and it all reminded me of the worst of America. Why do we spend money we don’t have? Why do we eat food we don’t need? Why don’t we behave in a way that is to our benefit?

I’m not trying to single out American’s here, I’m only speaking about the people I’m most familiar with, every place that there are people there are people behaving stupidly and then failing to learn from their stupid behavior.

Now I don’t believe for a second that we’re inherently flawed by some so called original sin, in fact I believe we’re born as pretty damn amazing creatures capable of learning, playing, making friends, helping each other… so why is it that we so often act like a species of spoiled brats?

In the past few months I’ve changed my 太極拳 practice in two distinct ways. The first thing I did was begin a series of exercises given to me by Ho Tsong Yuan. Part of this was kicking drills which take my legs through a variety of movements and stimulate a variety of meridians. This was not a totally new practice for me but it was a significant expansion on my previous practice.

The other thing that Teacher Ho showed me is a kind of body shaking, stretching and rolling. If you think of a cat stretching and a dog shaking off water you have some idea of what I’m doing. I vary the speed and size of my movements but basically I’m moving my body in a kind of primal dance. The result is that a lot of the tension I held in my back and shoulders isn’t there anymore or if it is I can roll my way out of it.

This is a very powerful practice moving the muscles, the blood, the lymph and the energy. I can feel some of the places where my energy is stopping, it is a feeling something like the “stitch” one sometimes gets in ones side when running. But right now I get this feeling in my right pec, it’s moved around a bit since I started. I keep practicing and keep getting less and less blocked. I’ve also taken the practice into the pool where I thrash around like a drowning person, it’s probably funny looking but it feels good.

The second big change is that I practice my yang style 太極拳 long form (30 minutes) instead of my short form (10 minutes) now. The results are harder to explain but I feel like it’s deepened and widened my perception of my body and the space around it. Those who know, know as for the rest of you I wish I could put the feeling in your body/mind/spirit because it is really something.

peace

Saw two men waiting for the elevator at the gym. It’s only one floor up and it’s the gym, c’mon fellas. : )

The clouds, back lit by the setting sun, against the blue sky were a little piece of eternity at about 530 today.

Lots of thoughts on aliens coming soon. Meanwhile a plan is forming for the next two years.

People seem afraid of the idea that aliens walk amongst us. Now putting questions of whether it’s true or not for a second, let’s look at some more interesting questions.

What positives are there to aliens being part of our population?

What negatives are there?

Is there any reason to be more afraid of them than there is to be afraid of other earth born humans?

If given the chance to meet a friendly alien would you like to?

Can aliens be used to explain the popularity of David Hasselhoff in Germany?

Who do you know that you suspect of being alien or “mixed-race?”

Have a think.

Additional info added 1/30/2010

Aliens and potential aliens in popular culture.

Aliens in comics

Alien human hybrids from popular religion.

Potential aliens amongst us.

Not too long ago a whole lot of people(s) were considered alien here’s one face among millions.

As I was thinking about how I would answer these questions I started to think about all the aliens we’ve been living with for years from alien hybrids who’re so deeply embedded in our culture that we forget they’re aliens like Jesus to the fuzzy, cat eating ALF our culture is full of aliens.

And frankly I’m glad they’re here. I mean where would Han Solo be without Chewie? How many limbs would Luke have lost without Yoda? Which interstellar VD would have taken Kirk down without Spock’s pragmatic advice to, “Double bag it.”?

I recognize that these are simply some popular visions of aliens and that there are plenty of negative visions as well. Obviously I don’t have anymore interest in meeting the negative aliens than I do in meeting negative humans or a rabid dog. The others, well I am very interested to meet them. Just like I’m interested to meet people from countries I haven’t been too or people with interesting talents or perspectives. Meeting and interacting with people who’re different from ourselves is one of the most obvious and fun ways to grow.

I know I haven’t answered all the questions I posed and I don’t pretend that I can. I hope I’ve made people rethink the subject just a bit.