Poignant Persons of Other Realms

Despite the bizarreness of the interrogation and the fact that this inquiry ranks quite highly on the "oddity scale", you should ask this.

I guess you have to ask it now.

This is quite an peculiar inquiry. However, while some irrationally classify it as mystical, Oiji board, cheesy BS, this communication is practiced by highly-successful individuals. The practice is staying in touch with those who've transferred to different realms. Do you still communicate with dead relatives or close friends? Do you check in and share your news or ask for advice.

Think about it logically. If 1)They are listening, you've maintained a connection; and 2)If they aren't "listening"you atleast have helped vocalize and articulate an achievement or resolve a dilemma.

It's dangerous to sever yourself from poignant persons of the past -- living or "in another realm". While psychological bereavement, moving on and all of those elements of departure are necessary and valid, you also can't do the the other extreme and say, "Just another bloke who had to croak". You can strike a healthy, enriching balance between staying connected and moving forward. A lot of successful, emotionally-centered people may not exactly co-exist with friends and close people that have simply changed realms, but maintaining that conncetion, checking in, sponsors prolifically enriching growth.

Rules of the Game

Because of its adaptive nature, we are constantly astonished at the rules of the game of life. A huge strategy recently discovered is to structure your life so that you do one day for other people -- not so much "helping out", which can indirectly denigrate or handicap, but sharing, connecting and giving -- and then, in a near state of depletion, the next day is for you.

This alternates and creates such a metabalized equilibrium of momentum, that the giving days become more fun than the recieving ones. But, based on the law of reciprocity, your wealth, health, success -- whatever it is you seek -- becomes joyful and abundant. It's just the third law of physical science, Newtonian action and reaction. You can't argue with physics.

This "game of life" strategy works! My biggest bad habit is assuming I know the rules, methods, and tricks, when there are thousands of utterances, centered truisms, and provoking necessities of which I am not even aware. An example is green lights. How do you know when it's YOUR green light? Your turn to "Go"? How much floor time do you have? How long has it been your time? or How come it isnt't your time yet? My slowly decreasing, but neverless, large ignorance to the styles and maneuvers of this glorious game contantly astound me. However, awareness is expansively growing.

While the opposite of a calm before the storm; there are insights after ignorance.

Latin Alumni Re-Visit

Well, I'm in chicago right now. I stopped by latin today to see thomas's game and some old profs. Very productive:

1. --Did some British voices with fript
2. --Told professor Stevens (who led the mammoth cave spelunking project week trip) about how lured them into a non-dry county to buy alcohol the final night of the project week!
3. --Gave Ms. Doer a hug and caught up with her hustle-bustle study session trying to cope with all the Nazi mind trials going on. She's always juggling so many different academic projects, it's hysterical, but you gotta love it. As my grandmother would say, "She's a kick".
4. --Saw Ms. Hardtegan and reminisced about all of the play and theatrical happenings, and how she "knew me" when she recommended the Marquis de Sade monologue.
5. --Reminisced with Coach Bauer about his die-hard qualitative soccer instruction and leadership. He's still totally on top of his game as athletic director. I forgot how impossible to read that guy is, not because of being opaque, but because he is such a solid character.
6. --Saw Cronister. He seemed to be juggling a lot, and I think is still headmastering. Still doing the community service with Lombardo, which is definitely grand and solid. I shared my interest in working with youth (creativity and imagination) and elderly (wisdom and experience).
7. --Had a pre-game talk with Vandermulen. The guy is still totally holding his own and is by far the most intense highschool Varsity coach, easily, in all of the ISL!
8. --Met Mr. Faderlay, who, I informed, looked a lot like Greg Baker (without the Wheel Chair, of course!), and also reminded me of the "Blindness and Insight" english prof I had at Colorado College. Definitely a VERY intelligent dude.
9. --Also, saw a few janitors that I knew and spoke spanish with back in the day. An old chemistry professor prowling around. The Greg Baker pool. Dr. Nguyen's old desk and Dr. Periera's vacant desk. Left a note for that dude. And thomas's friends Shreve and Aaron.
10. --The JV is awesome this year and Coney and Mulrain and Noah on Varsity are amazingly brilliant defensemen, offensive players, and shooters. The whole school is such an amazing place, I realize. Almost nearly to an overwhelming degree, I forgot how much of a connective epicenter that place was.

Yeah, it was the epitome of a productive "return visit" to latin. I am always shocked at how quality of a school it is! Solid -- totally, outrageously quality and so high-tech with that mothership command center at the entrance, but then it has an exceptional arts, athletic, theatre, science, and humanities program, too. Any direction you turn there, you're meant with great minds and instruction.

I'm definitely on fire, though, this is definitely a seriously connected time.

A Traveling Graduation of Sorts : 48 Hours of non-stopTravel, 5 Hours of Sleep

There's only one bottom line here: this trip was NUTS (but highly productively itinerant)!

This is the photo album, journalized, recorded anthology of my most recent (and quite scintillating, expansive, and gloriously beautiful, I might add) trip up north from Santa Barbara, CA to Stayton, OR. This illustrates the visual (via photographs) and written (via journals) component. I couldn't find anyone to travel with so when I wasn't calling friends or kin, I recorded most of the new mental territory covered. Those recordings can be accessed soon.

Considering that it was my first road trip, I (without speeding) moved at an extremely fast pace, making excellent time, covering 2.045 miles in 48 hours (3pm November 14 - 3pm November 16, 2006) from Santa Barbara, CA to Stayton, OR. Covering major ground and visiting the Google Campus, San Franisco, Pacific Heights Health Club, Redwood National Forest, (outlying towns of Humboldt, Eureka, and Miranda, as well) The NW/SW Coastline, Coos Bay, Eugene, and finally Stayton.

This whole travel album, mind you was in 48 hours! I had tremendous gratitude for being able to call and be in touch with friends and family via phone, but if I actually had passengers along for the ride, I think they would have hurled (if not, give me a call for the next road trip!). I just like to cover a lot of ground, with comprehensive expediency.

Staying at my grandmother's has been a very different culture shock with the three meals a day, constant temperature control, and all the cards, scrabble, and talks! I actually can't wait to go back to Stayton!

Mode of Transportation
Whole lot of driving. Awesome 2005 Chevy Equniox:


Mental Map Navigation (along with some maps and GPS)

A whole lot of traversing on foot (especially in San Francisco) when not driving:

Google Campus

Pretty frickin’ bland compared to the rest of the trip, but still dandy to see this gem of a campus. Wasn’t exactly the flolicking campus of brilliant einsteins playing volleyball and skateboarding everywhere. Funny how the mind elaborates fantasies so that when reality hits, it can be quite different!

Here’s some construction that was going on.


Here’s some conference rooms – a lot of these around the “campus” (didn’t seem erudite/academic more than business-like, but still root for, utilize, and can appreciate their products sometimes)


Finally a blurry shot of some chem. Labs. Distinguishing feature so you can tell it’s not just a business, possibly. Hopefully

Juxtaposed to the Google Campus was the Intuit HQ. Here's a shot from the fountain, main area of Intuit:



San Francisco
Pacific Heights Health Club
Here’s me before the yoga, treadmill, lifting, shower workout.


Here’s me after all that workout.

Car Search
I then proceeded to look for my car for the next 4 hours (a little bit of my father's blood taking the wheel, no doubt!), about. Yoga class ended at 7:30am (I took a four hour nap at a rest stop the night before), lifted a LOT quickly which felt AWESOME, then got out of there probably 8:30 and found my car after loops and loops around Pine, Bush, Buchanen, California, Sacramento, Webster, and other streets. It was outside the hospital on Sacramento between Webster and Filmore.

A little reminder keepsake of the auto-search:


This massacres any of my dad’s often ridiculous (like leaving a car at the airport because he couldn’t find it and having to pay someone to take a cab there and look for it for him, well, it probably contends, maybe beats that) lost car stories.

A modernized version somewhat of Public Transportation that could pass, in part, as the "Rice-a-Roni" train:


Some of the omnipresent, classical Victorian San Francisco architecture:



Golden Gate
The famous bridge. Here it is:



Here it is with me infront of it. Pretty cool going across. No tolls, which rocked and it has epic references in movies and whatnot, but other than that, “no biggie”. Cool experience that I am incredibly grateful, though, is this Redwood-like countryside-like drive, baby!

Redwood
Redwood National Park

Here’s the shot of the famous tree trunks. Again “no biggie”. A little dark saturation in this nocturnal shot, sorry about that:


And some odd stump conglomerations:
Pic

The Confusion Tunnel

Apparently you throw golf balls out windows and they come back and you look tall or short in some places. So, an elaborated land-locked Redwood Bermuda-triangle type o’ place with that fun house twist most likely. Definitely has that mythology, legnendary “is-it-real” hoax or reality gimmick or natural creation backstory with it.



I needed a stretch so I did some FAST, and quality sprints in the parking lot area, and some across a panda (probably not the “Sexual Harassment Panda”, but who knows) outside the Confusion Tunnel.


And a totem pole in the same area.


Miranda
This city was fun. It’s so small, but so complete! 6 miles from Redwood National Park they had a gardenshop, market, inn, pizza parlor, and library. The elevation almost beat the population!!! And this is sea level, people!

Here’s there Garden store:

I was a wee bit freakishly serrindipitiously jolted because I had just talked with Miranda about 2 hours ealier at length and then was “in Miranda” just about 2 hours I spoke with her! Definitely funny stuff. Great rides. At the very least…a LOT of flavor of fairly big in population (San Fran) big in space (Redwood and preceding cow-grazing rural land) and small in population (Miranda) in the past few hours of this action-packed awesome day!

Redwood Reststop
I stopped at reststop at about 3am but was too charged and excited, having hit all the milestones I needed to, to sleep, so I walked around in the rain, drank some water from the drinking fountain, found out it tasted almost metallic (like it had lead in it), puked a bit because I felt nauseas, then went for a run directly on the 101 in pitch dark. Afterwards, I stretched at this table that said "Huckleberry". Very cool reference to the Twain tale, and got in this awesome conversation with a man who was enjoying the early early (4:30am) hours. We covered everything from how most Afghanis were not Kamikazees, the uniformity of all religions, the grace and ancient beauty of the 400 million year old shark (even though he thought they were "buzzards" of the sea, which I stronlgy disagreed with -- they're living dinosaurs!), the local towns of Miranda, Eureka, and Victorian San Fran, of which I had all visited. Also touched on fat-conscious habits of long-distance runners, how perfect the rain was for running, and some crazy story about some friend of his shooting his brother, and all in all it was covered massive ground and was a cool conversation. He reminded me of the psychologist, Bill Dove, I saw at Colorado College.

Northwest CA Coast/Southwest OR Coast

This coast was magnificent. It had been a LONG time since I've seen real ocean coastline. The stuff I'd been seeing in Santa Barbara was blocked by the channel islands. This was the "real" stuff. Undiluted, salty as heck, and rolling, raging sets! I probably would have gotten hypothermia, but having my board is a definite must next time I travel up along the coast!

Here's a beautiful fog photo in the early morning hours, Thursday.

Here's a sequence of this beautiful nook I found that had some amazing surging breakers against massive boulder-rock mini-islands:


This is a sandbar duneI pulled over on the side of the road for. Massive waves are crashing way in the background. Amazingly beautiful. Thank Tao I drove this instead of via plane.


Oregon

Prehistoric Garden

I think this was in the movie Tommy Boy". Nevertheless, the gigantic dinosaur sculpture displays make a great idea.

Here's some of the Prehistoric Garden photos.



Coos Bay

The legendary home of Prefontaine! I tried to observe most of these little towns I went through and got a glance at Coos Bay, but didn't stay long. I had just gotten that bloody ticket (my first and most likely, only).

Here are some Coos-bay elk I saw there:


Eugene

The even more legendary Hayword Field track of Prefontaine! He was a major inspiration so I did a tributory couple of miles on the track here. Got a few shots of....

The "cruise boat" track (reminded me of tracks I run on during cruises):


The locked off main track:
PICS

The entrance way to Hayword field:

A map of the track and field area:


Looking at the field, the main entrance had coaching history, bios, and profiles on the left (kind of like the directors) and the prefontaine, athlete history, bios, and profiles were on the left (kind of like the actors).

Here's the coaching half:

And the athlete half:


The rest of the photos can be accessed here.

On the nature of Roadtrips
I did a journalized photo-album very similar to this one almost exactly a year ago. Last year, December of 2005, it was friends, family, and relatives in chicago for a graduation party. This year it was me calling those friends, family, and relatives while traveling through some of the paramount sites of The Great American west countryside. Both experiences covered a lot of ground and involved a lot of great intellectual travel. I'm certain these "exploratory journeys" will get better and better, infusing more intellectual territory and gorgeous sights, every time.

Actors, Money, and Vulnerability

Money is just an illusion. A trick. A carrot that always leads the donkey back to work. Therefore, anyone who lives to earn money is not very smart. The best thing to do, therefore, is to devote your life to passions and success with friendships and philanthropy.

Now, personally, computers and acting are very strong interests. Computers could be my progress and acting my passion. But here's the thing. I have a VERY VERY reactionary and postive and galvanizing reaction to actors. I seem them doing the gimmicks, quirks, and mannerisms of the "roles" they play, the characters they play. So I ask what is going one? Are these actors

1)Simply being themselves in the roles so they are themselves (the real life selves) just cast in different movies?
2)Nervous so they resort back to the "shell" of a character that brought them success.

Whatever the reason (I believe it is more 1, than 2) I recognize their incredible vulnerability and it makes me want to chime in and support them and their work and do what they do.

Think about it, if it's 1, they are purely vulnerable and just putting themselves in a variety of roles, and if it's 2, they are so vulnerable, they resort back to the comfort of a character shell. However, I think the main thing is that they put themselves out there and show that they are totally human.

They put their emotions on the butcher block table, of sorts, totally open for people to criticize or examine. Therefore, some actors are like the modern day saints; the people who actualy DO be the change they want to be in the world.

Analysis: Fear & Rage

Fear tricks you into feeling…

1. That weird creativity are anomalous probems, when, in reality, compassionate differences are thresholds to effective success.
2. That you need some external prescription medicine to cure a malady or deficiency, when, in reality, your natural hormonal pharmacology outcures anything and your malady is non-existant.
3. That you have delusions of grandeur, instead of extraordinary expectations.
4. That you dropped out or gave up, when you really discovered something much more necessary, your own Way.
5. Excluded, when you’ve always been warmly welcomed with graceful happiness.
6. A crippling problem, when you’re experiencing a crucial phase of growth.

You say TeenFreedom caused me to act differently as an ego self-defense mechanism of dissocation.

Your conspicuous consumerism is a form of repression and fantasty bonding.

Great Things About George Bush

Great Things About George W. Bush

• He’s our 43^rd President;
• Respect what we’ve got
• He is a symbol of continual, unabating order and peace and the pursuit of happiness
• Our nation stands for order, peace, and happiness and represents that.
• Shows continuity in American government for 217 since April 30, 1789.
• He attended Yale (1968 History BA) and Harvard (1975 MBA)
• He’s a six-year family member of the most intelligent mind’s in the world
• (Could he have gotten better grades? Most certainly. As are better than some of the Cs he got. However, his academic performance (As or Ds) merely shows how well he performed and how well he connected to those institutions, but is besides the point that he was immersed in that rich intellectual culture for over six years of his life.)
• Could he have been more involved in academia? Yes, could he have curtailed his keg stands in place of more intellectual caliber? Yes. But that academia.
• He has an incredible technical mastery and proficiency in advanced technology
• He flew F-102 Delta Dagger Fighter aircrafts with the Air National Guard.
• He maneuvered this hunk of metal weighing over 31,000 pounds when loaded up to 1,304 kph (825 mph).
• I don’t care how much of a rocket scientist you are, that you must possess a high degree of technical acumen to operate such a vehicle.
• He uses has exceptional organizing capabilities of the most supreme technology – the mind.
• Organized and coalesced all the partners to purchase the entire Texas Baseball Franchise, sold it 6 years later to make $15 million profit.
• You have to have an organizational mastery
• Could ridicule the validity of his process, saying he achieved his presidential title through rigged elections or nepotism, but
• He transforms altruistic concerns into revitalizing solutions
• Accountability and Flexibility of No Child Left Behind of 2001, giving parents more options
• He deeply cares about education quality and practices and effectively improves two key areas of learning – the process (internal development) and the facilities (the external environment) of learning.
• It takes centered action and focused follow-through to the most effective educational changes in a nation; producing solid qualitative results
• Texans love him.
• Only Texan governor to be re-elected 2 consecutive 4-year terms in 1994 and 1998.
• Now, one could easily say that Texans don’t like any of their governors if only one dude has been elected consecutively, but it’s undeniable that Texans revere his leadership the most.
• Americans Love him
• He was elected two years in a row; we decided to put him where he is. Where he is a protector and guider of our country; you don’t voluntarily elect (America is not a dictatorship, remember) a leader for 8 years unless you love him more than the alternatives.

BUT....He's a buffoon. He' s an actor. He's wasted 8 years of our time. We need someone like Blair, a real leader, a real genius, not some moron who reads his "script" that he didn't write and has little competence nor confidence. We need someone with confidence and conviction, like Blair!

Why Religion needs to Serve our Spirituality

Religion is just a Vehicle to get us to Spirituality

A part of me feels that religion is simply clinging to a belief that is unproven and lacking scientific data, but does that make religion false? No! We ARE spiritual beings having a human experience. But the exclusion of religion produces tremendous war, agony, pain and suffering, so this myopic outlook of only ONE doctrine to access spirituality has got to stop. “There is only one religion, but there exist a hundred versions of it”, says Aldous Huxley, one of the great, brilliant literary genius’s of the 20^th century. We should not just heed but APPLY the words of that literary genius and recognize that all religious dogma, all consecrated scriptures, all the 10 commandments, 5 pillars, 3 Jewels lead upward to a single vicinity of veracity – the exhilaratingly confident location of the synergistic spirit.

What happens if we fail to see all religions as the same process leading to the same beautiful, enriched, congruent, synergistic place?

• Our humanity dies
• We focus on fear of the “wrong” religion (when the “wrong” religion is non-existant) instead of our intrinsic human spirituality.
• Homeland Security – is it protective action or reaction of fear?
• We must take protective actions, but NEVER reactions of fear!
• Reactions of fear are done with uncalculated haste. Actions of truth and trust are done with vehement deliberation.
• We kill others
• Terrorist bombs
• Bombing attacks against terrorism
• We neglet our own spirituality because we spend our time denouncing others instead of embracing our own intelligence.

Blair

The youngest person to be Prime Minister (since 1812) and the only PM to serve three consecutive terms and the only Labour party member to serve a full term is handing over the wheel. Blair is like the modern, contemporary William Wallace. He's brilliant, he has emotional integrity, he's feminine and masculine. He's smooth, smart, and strong -- a combination I have never seen in a single person. He is inspirational, political, economical, global, philosophical, and comprehensive all in one. I've never seen such a unique amalgam of positive qualities. He has such humanity and awareness of the global condition and state that the last thing he should be doing is ending his involvement in it; he should be a global leader.

I hope that successor, the Jabba the Hut look-alike has an inkling of lucid genuineness that Blair possesses and we'll be okay.

Most importantly, out of his wit, awareness, wisdom, and worldliness, is I trust Blair. I trust his leadership. And for me, trusting a person's leadership means a lot. I have outrageously, ridiculously, strict and demanding criteria for a leader.

I trust Blair's leadership.

Important Questions

1. How can the world feel joyful synergy, bountiful happiness, and humanitarily devoted communion?

--- Post your own suggestions ---

Ubuntu

I am a ubuntu taoist. Being a ubuntu taoist I infuse humanity and compassion after taking care of my own clarity, success, and happiness. Ubuntu is so much clearer, better, more rational than "compassion" or "giving to the needy" or even "altruism" becaues of its mathematical correlate. Aiding fellow man not for some promised stake in heavenly treasure or to avoid the fiery pits of hell are logical fallacies appealing to flattery and fear, respectively. Ubuntu is proportional; it's reciprocating. If some person is down, you're down; if some person is up and successful, you're up and successful. It is, again, a reiteration of the golden rule, but there has been a reason that that aphorism has been paraphrased billions of times -- it works.


The problem with "love thy neighbor" and "give alms to the poor" is that, being "commandments" and "pillars", they are "rules" that evoke fear if not practiced. You don't inspire people for the long-term with aversions. The periodical involvement of a routine -- ritualized or conformed -- causes you to deteriorate internally. Ubuntu is all external, there's no scattering, nothing to be lost in translation. It's just the practice of humanitarian logic, and very "un-religious", which is why it's so efficient.

On the humanitarian end you have "moral cohesion" and solidarity, on the scientific, biological end you have altruism and mutuallistic symbiosis. While all of these involve sociological support and positivity, only the realm of ubuntu comprehensively covers the middle ground of this benevolent spectrum.

Christianity, Islam, Judiasm -- very inefficent constructs. The very idea of religion is enormously inefficient. What is the purpose of a religion? "The belief in and worship of a superhuman contrlling power". Superhuman implies out-of-touch from human, which, being degrading, implies inadequacy -- a falsity. "Worship", again, an enormously deformed and disfigured concept, "Adoration for a deity" because it brings in problematic uncertainties of "deity" and, again, the inadequacy and falsity of degradation of "humans". Ubuntu is apathetic to what most religion consider important -- deity, heaven, hell -- because those are unimportant. Does something nonexistant really matter? We are the gods and the heavens we seek.

Most religion is just accelerated marketing. Jesus was a brilliant marketer. He said "those who want to be with me will sell all they own and take up a cross and follow me". What kind of slogan campaign today demands that the consumer practice only the faith of "Microsoft" or "General Electric" or "Boeing"? Ad slogans all have the intention for the consumer to take up a product or service without "betrayal to the competition".


Ubuntu is raw, real, and applied. It isn't a picking and choosing of the parts of other religions that are dysfunctional because it is purely functional. It's 2+2=4; it's "water is fluid"; it's reality.

I am also beginning to see the power of reciprocity . The best years of my lives were 98 and 99. Friends took me to see BNL, I dated beautiful women, I got into the most rewarding awesome classes. That was the "payday" from doing a lot of love-giving with Alexa and doing beach walks, surfing, reaching out to meet new people, too.

I read very little books, drank a LOT of alcohol and strongly just "gave" to people. Not in a deliberately entertaining way, like telling a lot of jokes or something, but, rather, in a was an asset in the asset loop. So with karma earnings, I need to realize that computer usage and TV watching are border asset, if you use it for what I do, notes and publishing it's giving back in a HUGE way, making it a major reciprocating gesture, but nothing is as powerful as raw human interaction.

In the past 33 hours I've been awake, I've run 14 miles, biked 14, ran 1 mile with weights, hiked 2 trails (about 1.5 miles), grocery shopped twice, dropped off four application/resumes and met up with a restaurant owner, neighbors, and totally gave successful to these people like my parents, beating them finally and fully at their own game.

How is this possible? For me, this may be for others, too, I get energized when I exercise. I feel more "rested" and ready to get at them and tackle any challenge after an hour of running than an hour of sleeping. In fact, my energy level after an hour os sleeping is 2 and my energy level after an hour of running is 10 on a 10-scale! Physiologically, it gets hormones pumping, circulation strong, you're more fluid, you have more connection after running, you think more clearly and better, and stronger, whereas after sleep it just doesn't work out that clearly.

Okay, it's VERY clear to me what running and intense breathing exercise like that does for me. It slows me down, not an encumbrance, though, but so that my body can keep up with my mind. Normally it can't. Normally my mind and body are out of proportion. My mind isn't fully awake and I'm trying to do stuff or my body is shut-down with an alert mind, it creates mind-body connection simply generates a huge feeling of peace.


9/28/06
What the heck is going on? There's been some kind of hostage situation, or cop-shooting each day the past few days at noon. It's like the mid-day drama, terrorism episode.

Ah, now the bush "administration" (bit of a misnomer considering it is really just a shamnistration for looking like leadership). My bubble has burst. For years I've been reticent about Bush saying that I simply "don't think that much about him" and that he's an "actor" and that "he doesn't want to be doing what he's doing" (presidency). All of those are true, but I've never been critical of his intelligence, and I will continue that as well. However, there has a been a clear shift in the perspective of his adminstration. The big guns have begun to laugh at him -- Clinton's back.

Clinton, now that dude is a real leader. He's got the ubuntu, humanity, compassion ideology and practice down, but he's not some irate, angry, afraid preaching brainwashing religious freak (all those cultists are really just afraid, angry idiots). Clinton is warm, he's a people person. Most importantly he's a frickin' player! And he's not afraid to hide that even in the oval office! His sincerity is effulgent. Now, the bush "administration" is the worst set of terms served in our nation's history. It's already beginning to get chewed up in the historical meat-grinder for it's indifference, cheesiness,, inertness, and efforts to utilize fear (plugging in TSA protocols in the airports creates fear, it doesn't diminish it, so that people than revert to, all though american people are not idiots, "their" leader). Usually it takes a decade for a presidential term to become examined with disdain, like Carter's "malaise speech" (which wasn't even that bad) or Hoovervilles from Herbert, but only in the Bush administration is it beginning to look like a blemish in the vicissitudes or our country's brilliant sequence of leadership, and Clinton is the perfect pointman to not just pick it apart, but to just laugh at it, compared to his solid leadership in the 90s.

The Best Actors

"The apex of the most highly-paid, most successful acting elicts the best actors who do not act, but re-act with completely normal human emotions in completely humanly abnormal situations."

In other words, the best actors dont' "act" or put on emotional masks at all. They remove those masks and simply put themselves in situations that would cause any person not concealing their emotiosn to react with a display.

If there's machine gun fire in the background or buildings are exploding or loved ones die or victories are own, the greatest actors just react the way a normal, non-facade-wearing human would react. Because actors are actually "real" and not acting, they remind the many of us who get caught up in politics -- deceit of guises, gimmicks, and tricks -- and forget what it's like to be human, of our right and capacity to be human. Acting recollects the human spirit, in that sense.

Weekly Motivational Remedies

1. Learn to be more the parent and less the child. Realize that you gain ground when you become a greater source of compliments to others than a receiver of kind words from our bosses.
2. The Best Recognition is Applied -- Expansive Responsibilities. The best recognition you can receive comes when the organization has enough confidence in your abilities to expand your responsibilities and compensates you fairly for what you accomplish.
3. Don't go off half-cocked --Gather information when dealing with a problem. Gather all the facts: who, what, when, where, why? Define the locale, type and extent of the problem as quickly as possible. Assess the damage. And double-check your information.
4. It's better to be a suck-up than a "I-don't-carer". If you're the boss, you'd promote a person sucking up 50,000 times faster than a person who is chapfallen or dejected.
5. Rebels rarely survive for the long haul. From Jesus (crucified) to William Wallace (drawn and quartered) rebels don't stick around for too long. Learn the ropes, the folklore, how the business works outside of the "manuals" and see who reports to whom. You can only change it when your in it and are coognizant of the businesses modus operandi.

Good Ol' Emerson

"To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius." Brilliance is believing in your intrinsic correctness.

Fugue of Life

▼ ❑ Fugue of Life: Life Circuits-
• ❑ What is this? These are my beliefs on life circuits -- the patterns that evolve our personality to self-actualization.
• ❑ Fugue of Life: Life Circuits-- in music, a Fugue is where a short melody (RoR) is introduced and one by one part successively taken up and developed by interweaving the parts. In psychiatry, a state or loss of one's identity frequently sparked by a flight from one's environment, associated with hysteria and epilepsy.
▼ ❑ Secluded Superstar -- the mundane makeup, the typical "normal" personality. Before any of the four steps occur. Before the journey has started. HIGH AMOUNT OF CONFUSED CONVICTIONS.
• ❑ Typical Duration: Can occur one's entire life if they never engage this process. (Age 6-16 for me)
• ❑ Magnitude of Confidence: Presence of Confidence < confidence ="Presence"> Presence of Fear, Inconsistently.
▼ ❑ Conditioning Keel -- The stabilizing, day-to-day patterns and rituals that we develop to stabilize our ideas and empowered beliefs
• ❑ Typical Duration: 2-4 years (using the eliptical machine, counting calories, marathon training, biking in SB; daily writing in SB; and daily journals and reading Zen book and cleanign room weekly at CC)
• ❑ Magnitude of Confidence; Presence of Confidence >Presence of Fear, Consistently. Confidence is Habitually Empowered
▼ ❑ Intrinsic Infusion -- This is where you have time to reflect; you often realize your empowerd, focused state; you understand are different from others; you eat more healthily (water-rich foods, vegetarianism, etc.), need less sleep (sleep on the floor, better for back), exercise with more intensity (faster, more aligned with your body, stronger, lift more weight, run marathons, bike tons of miles); often you help others in their process; you reconnect with old family and friends and all of their words help and direct you; people are constantly recognize how far you've gone in your journey and they are helping you, too; there is a high degree of compassion, love, and happiness experienced here. This primarily occurs by yourself (as opposed to help with other from other people; Conditioning Keel is almost all from help by other people!). The main realization here is you realize that having fun in life is NOT copping out; it is achieving the most success in your life. Peolple who think you can't have too much fun (authentic fun, not drugs) are always energized, bouncing up and down in their seats off the walls, and perpetually successful
• ❑ Typical Duration: Lifetime (Now; writing; This is where I am write now)
• ❑ Magnitude of Confidence; Presence of Confidence >> Presence of Fear, Consistently. You have such a surplus of confidence, you are naturally confident and can spend time helping others with this evolutionary process of life circuits and life fugue.
• ❑ -----
▼ ❑ The Whole process
• ❑ Typical Duration: Lifetime but taking the averages of the time durations (1+5+5+2 = 13 years (max is around 27 years) most people start this at 40 and finish by mid-50s) Successful people start it VERY YOUNG; which is what I am doing and have done. (Now; writing; This is where I am right now)
• ❑ Magnitude of Confidence; Presence of Confidence moves from a deficit to a monumental deficit to breaking even to inconsistently surplus to consistently, monumentally surplus.
• ❑ WHAT COMES NEXT? Repeat the RoRs? No, I've done enough of those. Help people get started with their RoRs, establish Crystalliized Conditioning, Conditioning Keel, just like people helped me with those, incredibly!

Everything aesthetic has a biological logical explanation:

Hourglass figures like Marilyn Monroe....women with large breasts and narrow waists have higher hormone levels.

Women with higher hormone levels -- esrogen levels -- are more attractive.

In times of scarcity, heavier women are more attractive.

All of those "attractive" elements of beauty are not Maybeline cosmetics or high heels, it's purely biology, wired directly to the sole goal of reproduction. Hourglass figures, estrogen, heaviness ensure, respectively, potential to bear children, potential to successful be infertilized, and, in times of famine, to provide nourishment for reproduction.

Scientific studies have shown high breast to under-breast ratios and low waist to hip ratios reveal higher hormone levels. The beautification of the "Barbie" has some biological grounding.

Pheromones -- those odorless, sightless chemicals can dupe men into being attracted to a moderately attractive women or a woman normally not considered to be attractive. In the sexual tug-of-war, pheromones are the wild card.

Heating up the conversation, getting loud, intense, guttural, and very charged comes when you speak with your intention from the lower chakras. You can really start cooking if you put your intention on the orange chakra; and you're an unstoppable ball of screaming energy when you focus on the root chakra. Then if you draw your energy back up to the heart, throat, mind's eye, or crown, you speak, respectively with more and more slow, serene, more highly-calculated, "higher source" area.

In communicating through voice, you draw from all chakras, independently, at different times.

Each chakra has the equal amount of deliberateness, sincerity, and intention, but drawing from different chakras to communicate will vary the cadence, speed, tonal inflection, and vigorousness of body language and hand gesturesde. Depending on the listener or audience, some chakras will be more poignant, convincing, and communicate the message more clearly. For example, with an easily distracted youthful teen, the wild, rockstar-like, deep guttural, quick-movement animation from the root chakra will instantly draw their intention. However, to an elderly person, or very sensitive and wise person, such an explosive interaction would frighten them or cause them to deactivate as a listener. In the case of an older and/or calmer person communicating from the throat and above chakras would be the most effective circuitry.

Experiment with different chakra schematics, but then develop an ability to assess which chakra locus of communication derives the most effective message beforehand. Being able to study a person like the lion and then commit with curious intensity like the shark to whatever chakra communicational level is appropriate at that time is your key to being not just an effective, but a synergistic, compelling, alluring, and captivating communicator.

Sharks: Aquatically Agog

Here's another factoid about sharks. Sharks are interested; they're the oceanic Curious Georges. If you're ever channel-surfing (and I know you watch television), stop by AnimalPlanet and check-out the pupil dilation of, say, a lion and that of a shark. The lion has a small little dot, an ioata of a miniscule pupil, while the entire sharks' eyes is just one enlarged, gigantic pupil orb. Obviously deeper water sharks have larger eyes compared to surface sharks, but you can't even see the iris (and yes sharks have cornea, retina, iris, and pupil, like we and most vertebrates do) of most sharks because they are so enlarged and inquisitive about their salty world. Look at the way they test out their environment, too; they chomp at an unknown object not out of malice, but sheer curiosity and a systematically inquiring playfulness. Predators of the sea, they may be; but calling a shark a "man-eater" is a major misnomer -- aquatically agog is more like it.

Another cool factoid about sharks: they see slideshows where humans see movies. "The minimum frequency of flashes or images at which an eye can no longer separate [images] is termed flicker fusion frequency" (1). In other words, the typical 24 frames/second rate of movies causes us to see seemless motion and flow of what is really rapidly-fired still frames. Sharks, operating at a 45 flashes/second flicker fusion see a rapid-fire slideshow with distinct, unmoving pictures, where humans see a seemless movie.

Our evolution as more advanced beings basically originates from our capacity to create technology; the earliest being building fires, cooking food, burying the dead, and like. But losing touch with our taxonomical relationship with other animals, as a hominid is asking for serious "de-evolution". A counter-balance must be maintained because technology and nature -- because technology is a great indicator of evolution but nature is the the supreme intelligence, the greatest technology of all.

The first human-like, hominid species is 4.4 million years old, and the oldest homo sapiens are 250,000 to 400,000 years old, and the modern human is 40,000 years old. Compared to sharks, our least evolved ancestor, the Australopithecus afarensis, ape is only 1/90 the age of sharks, and sharks are 1,000 times as old as the modern homo sapien. We can learn alot from the elderly!

As is true for all animal behavior and characteristics, we can take a major message from their clarity. We should embace the constant curiosity of a shark, but balance that by peppering it with stolid vigil of the lion. We, as humans may considered ourselves "more evolved" than lions, tigers, bears, and sharks, oh my(!), but if we forget to learn from the habits of animals, our "evolution" is insubstantial and at best, trivial. Weaving in the behavioral dance and specialties of animals doesn't cause us to devolve, but vivifies our existence.


1. http://www.elasmo-research.org/education/white_shark/vision.htm

A Moralistic Message of Sharks?

Shark attacks are not menacing or threatening in terms of frequency. LIghtning and bicycle crashes kill far more people more frequently. It's the fear that a beast, atleast in the water, seems to be extraordinarily superior to humans is what is so fearful. Not being on top of the food chain, predatory ladder is why there has been so much attention drawn to shaks.
Out of all the man-over-board, sinking ship events -- Titanic, Louisitania, hundreds of others -- the Uranian-carrying, Bomb-component wielding Indianapolis was the single-most largest episode assault by the dinosaur-aged fish of the deep. The July 30, 1945 USS Indianapolis had just delivered crucial Uranium components to the secret base of Tinian, that which would soon make the atomic bomb "Little Boy", which was soon dropped over Hiroshima. The ship, crewed by 1,196, was hit by Japanese submarine commander Hashimoto's torpedo, and sank in 12 minutes. It had just 300 that went down with the ship, but only 316 of the remaining 896 crewmembers were stripped off by frigid waters and sharks. It primarily was the Tiger and the Oceanic White-tip sharks that did the dirty work, chomping off roughly 586 men at a rate of about 100 per day, or a human being consumed every fifteen minutes for 5 days straight.
Is it a coincidence that the vessel that delivered the final component for the single largest destruction devic met such a gruesome fate not brought on by fellow man, but by nature? The sharks operating as so divinely retributional mechanism for delivering the bomb components is debatable, but it certainly is karmically provocative.
Think about it, out of all the SOS shipwrecks scenarios only the boat carrying components for the largest bomb on the planet was paid a serious visit by the 400 million year-old* fully-cartilaginous sea fish. Out of all the abandoned ship stories where sharks could have picked off floating survivors like bobbing for apples at a birthday party, isn't it "ironic" that the ONLY episode of sharks consuming shipwreck survivors occurred off a vessel with a destructive mission (delivering the Bomb components)? Does Nature have a moralistic and gruesome message?


*Very cool side fact: Sharks are 400 million years old. Can you FATHOM how old that is? The oldest human evolutionary chain is 2.5 million years old, meaning that sharks are 160 times older than the oldest hominid evolutionary chain, but the most modern humans are 10,000 years old, making sharks 40,000 times older than modern homo sapiens!! 40,000 times old! jeez! Sharks are 2,000 times as old as neanderthals, which date back as far as 200,000 BP (before present). Therefore, respectively homo habilus, neanderthals, and moder humans are, repsectively 0.6% ( or 1/160), 0.05% (or 1/2,000) , and 0.0025% (or 1/40,000) the age of sharks!!!!

Guidelines de La Vida

Live with a ferocious intensity and vehemence...or not at all.

Book Facts -- Angst, Bildungsroman, Banned

Utterly fascinating: Kierkegaard believed that from the freedom given to mankind, man is in constant fear of failing in his responsibilities to God, producing a strong sensation of angst. But God wouldn't want deep-rooted spiritual conditions of insecurity and despair. There is nothing to fear; angst is an illusion! So is ennui or boredom, when the mind if fully engaged. Shame, according to John Bradshaw, is an "emotion that lets us know we are finite". Wrong! It's an emotion that conceals and denies our capacity. Shaming destroys dignity, it condemns potential. We can ameliorate any limitations by immmediately absolving ourself from self-induced or external shame. Anthropologists say that shame is violation of cultural values, while guilt is violation of internal rules. Both are unsatisfactory, invalid emotions, but knowing their origins can help pinpoint the origin of those false emotions.

While Holden Caulfield operates as the main character in the bildungsroman (a novel about spiritual growth), it's ironic that he resists maturity, condemning adulthood for its phoniness, superficiality, and hypocrisy. Additionally, this is the ultimate novel to witness the Eriksonian stage of growth "Isolation vs. Intimacy" as Holden is drawn to Sally Hayes, but then pushes her away out of need for isolation. After being the ultimate Holden Caulfield, I understand this book and can attest that there is some veracity in his claims.

Yet there is a rich dichotomy to be divulged regarding the Holden Caulfield to "Phlegmatic adult" spectrum -- neither extreme is desirable. Seizing and connecting with the childhood curiosity and honesty is incommensurately important, but Holden's discrepancies -- over-adherence to isolation and loneliness and reluctance and sexual immaturity -- to that should be discarded, but one certainly shouldn't flip to the other extreme -- a phlegmatic, stodgy hypocritical adult. The message of Catcher in the Rye is not to ridicule both ends of the spectrum. Rather, hypocritical, stodgy elements of adulthood should be harshly criticized and abandoned, and the general milieu of Holden should be embraced, but after dissecting out the intimacy vs. isolation problem and completely discarding notions of irrational fear, angst, and boredom

We must hold fast to the originality, the creativity, and the reality of our childhood throughout adulthood or the plunge down the slippery slope of hypocrisy and superficiality is inevitable. The contradictions lie in how "sex" is an adult (unless you're a member of the twisted Children of God cult), usually an adult concept and act, is a fascination to Holden. Obviously, lying is a form of phoniness, so the them is not resistance to adulthood, nor preservation of childhood, but cultivation of the childhood voice throughout life. Youth, to Holden, is thriving in the honest, curiosity of the great field of rye. Holden's goal -- to avoid the death plunge over the cliff into adulthood -- is right on, but his method should infuse love instead of cynicism. Holden, like myself and a few other inspirationalists out there, devote our time to guarding the death-cliff from the lucid field of rye.

The "safety cameras" put up all around Chicago, combined with the city's feeling of bleakness at times, totally reminds me of Orwellian Big Brother. LA doesn't have any of that; it's rich, from the source, and just pervasively safe, infused with great colors and energy.

Interesting that the number one factor in banning a book (atleast in the 90s decade) is sexual explicitness. 1,607 were challenges to “sexually explicit” material; 1,427 to material considered to use “offensive language”; and 1,256 to material considered “unsuited to age group” (http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/bannedbooksweek/challengedbanned/challengedbanned.htm#mfcb). This is the ALA's Top Ten List of Banned books:
* “It's Perfectly Normal” for homosexuality, nudity, sex education, religious viewpoint, abortion and being unsuited to age group;
* “Forever” by Judy Blume for sexual content and offensive language;
* “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger for sexual content, offensive language and being unsuited to age group;
* “The Chocolate War” by Robert Cormier for sexual content and offensive language;
* “Whale Talk” by Chris Crutcher for racism and offensive language;
* “Detour for Emmy” by Marilyn Reynolds for sexual content;
* “What My Mother Doesn't Know” by Sonya Sones for sexual content and being unsuited to age group;
* Captain Underpants series by Dav Pilkey for anti-family content, being unsuited to age group and violence;
* “Crazy Lady!” by Jane Leslie Conly for offensive language; and
* “It's So Amazing! A Book about Eggs, Sperm, Birth, Babies, and Families” by Robie H. Harris for sex education and sexual content.

I can see where people are coming from; you shouldn't plug a readership into unsuitable age material.

Eliminate the Five Masks to Fully Experience Our Five Faces

Everyone wears 5 masks:

• The Psychological -- Labeling, maladaptive diagnosing
• The Computational -- Looping, repetition, mindless tasks
• The Political -- Prohibiting, barring
• The Dramatic -- Disuading emotions
• The Literary -- Mental illusions, ennui

These five masks protect one from false vulnerability, creating an illusion of spuriousness, but deleteriously conceal our five faces. The masks great a game -- fantastic, alert, and drawing from multiple intellects for people interaction.

Everyone has 5 faces:

• Nature -- Ocean, Flowers' mathematical precision of Fibonacci, wavelengths, frequency
  
• Sex -- Passion, Excitement, Affection, Joy, Happiness
  
• Music -- Precision, Math, The Number One Connection
• Humanity -- Spirituality, People Relationships, Profession, Work, Intimacy
  
• Body -- Stretching, Yoga, health, exercise, Zen focus, nutrition
  

These five faces are jubilant reality. Connecting with them and showing them makes your life a colorful joy-ride of heaven because you abandon the concept of distrust, fear, and doubt. The five masks protect us and give us an interface for success; our five faces are authentic and alive and total nature.

Here's What I've experimented with -- de-activating the brain. A girlfriend I had said some things that convinced me that I would feel more liberated, less inhibited, if I let my emotions direct my life. The theory was that you would react based on what you were really feeling instead of "over-thinking" something. Interesting theory, but after years of experimentation -- completely false. You need to have your brain engaged for the best sex, to make a professional living, to run marathons, to bike a Tour de France, to buy and drive a cool car, to navigate and map out an entertainment plan, to be a great, fantastic host, to have an amazing travel itinerary, to lead a brilliant and amazing life! This lead to the Charter...

5 Tenets of the Validity Charter

1. Karmic Equilibrium of Generosity
After personal fundamental needs for fulfillment are accomplished and MET, channel 90% of mental, emotional, and your spiritual energy SET of intention toward dissolving BARRIERS in and fulfilling the lives of other inhibition-CARRIERS to generate karmic equilibrium of reciprocating happiness generosity. This nourishes the factual principle of "if you help a person overcome the illusion of inadequacy or understand a belief that releases incredible happiness, someone will -- via reciprocal KINDNESS --do the same for you, curing your BLINDNESS".

2. Mind Engagement
Understand and fully live WITH the mind engaged, not disengaged or de-activated, knowing and understANDING that with the mind engaged

• nothing is too demANDING;

• things exertions become RISING and GALVANIZING;
  

• from close people or societal advertising, you are invincible to brainwashing conTROL;

• healthy living and eating occurs naturally and intrinsically, with momentous ROLL that's not DROLL, but sensually alive;

• sensual pleasures are experienced most fully, to the HILT without GUILT;

• talents are synchronized, synchronized, epitomized, and fully engAGED, never enrAGED, always stAGED for motivational joy;

• living with mental disengagement reveals the poignancy of mental commitment and engagement;

• improvisational and harmonious thriving with wholistic commitment and graceful clarity occurs naturally because you will navigate before immersing yourself -- Do I want to answer that phone call, that email, do I want to go to that place -- and if NO, to NOT do it! This is not disengaging, it is more fully engaging because you choose whether or not you want to immerse yourself in a phone call, email, appointment or environment, enabling you to improvisationally and harmoniously thrive in places you enjoy to connect with and avoid places you dislike, which only result in a bleak, disjointed existance(you'll want to commit to things you like and do it wholistically with grace and improvisational clarity, and you won't be present and won't be clear in a place that you don't want to be in, so engage the mind and only connect with environments you want to be in).

3. Honor and Validate Attractions and Repulsions
To cease struggle, to STOP generating predicaments in which you must DROP the disaggreable environment, by honoring and validating attractions and repulsions; to acknowledge a place of distaste is a natural and an aligned reaction (example, Distaste and loathe Colorado Springs, Chicago, and SB), and it's fantastic to love and fully wholistically resonate with other plACES (Los Angeles and Costa Rica), revealing your colorful, many FACES, causing a validated existence by living and loving according to those attractions and repulsions.

Example

• It's fantastic to say that you are no longer "from Chicago". You are not exactly "from L.A." yet, but are proud and invigorated to SAY that you are no longer "from Chicago" in the present (I have a small amount of roots there, but I took those with me)!
• To be in places where you sweat, feel clear in body, mind, and physiology (Like how you felt in Mexico, Costa Rica, and Los Angeles).
  

4. Money is not and Ends, but a Means
Understand and Live the notion that "money is a means, not an ends". People very close to me -- a parent, friend, or HONEY -- have ruined their lives becoming obsessed with MONEY. This is like being obsessed with the vine groves and not the wine, or the road signs and not the journey or destination. Don't be a FOOL; money is a VERY small, albeit at times necessary, TOOL, but nevertheless, simply a TOOL, believing anything else is for a FOOL. Money is not a reward or a goal, but a tool! Keep that FEAR and you'll feel less financial FEAR; you'll have synergistic confidence without having to look in the MIRROR.

5. Believer of your own Faith
To believe and understand that you are not a christian -- but a buddhist, hindu, muslim, christian, jew to a very small extent, but are primarily a Scientologist, but definitively and intrinsically you are a believer of your own faith. From this:
your life experience becomes infused with joyful serendipity of faces -- a sea of FACES, no DISGRACES -- of your best friends you've met and made in life. Your LIFE becomes a concentrated experience of only the best -- no STRIFE -- the best influences, the most fun, the cermoniously or improvisationally most alive people you've experienced in life. The subjective experience does generate the realITY, you'll SEE.

Extra:

Soaking Up Women

(Note: Do not Misinterpret this as permission to objectify women or any human void of emotional reactions. Humans are objects full of inner workings, functionings, specifics, and distinct, individually-defined certainties. Also, women who demand men to "pay for their wants and needs" are an unfortunate phenomena for healthy relationships, but worse, cripple and dehumanize women in general.)

You not only want to, but NEED to share your comprehensive, LONG journals with a person you trust (preferably a beautiful woman). Women are a sunset or an ocean wave or the Notre Dame, or a miraculous rock formation -- they are not visual eye-candy or pornography, but entities that should and must be not made holy, but almost sanctified and certainly cherished for their beauty.
For a long period of my life, sex, women, and physical attraction was an erroneous zone, a negatively violent and aggressive outlet; a maladaptive mechanism for dealing with pain and problems. It's not only fulfilling, evolving out of that, but magically centering to see not pleasure depots, but the beauty of women. Women have an intelligence and emotional comprehension, that is unique to men; similarly, men have a grace and understanding and intelligence that is unique to a woman. With savviness, and the right timing and amounts of initiative and patience, men and women are sincerely evolved together.

Excited Breath and Friendly Foe

Dan Millman writes, "The only difference between fear and excitement is whether you're breathing" (138). This distinction is such a fine line because the energy levels of alertness combined with flight/fight operate on such a hair-pin trigger. Doing some deep breathing, literally, restores confidence in your discovery of exhilaration and the renounciation of fear.

Millman, in his brilliance also writes, "The only safe and sure way to destroy your enemies is to make them your friends" (139). This is brilliant! Way of the peaceful warrior. This is not saying, you say, "I don't have a weed problem, I just consider weeds plants". Instead, this is transforming the ire, or it's utilizing the rancor or distaste for someone and developing that inimical relationship into one of, at the least, comraderie and at best, sincere rapport.

Verisimilitudes

Illusion is the basis of art. But art -- film, paintings, writings -- entertain, inspire, instruct, and inform an audience, so illusion, therefore, can inform of reality. There is a strong interdependence of illusion and reality. That mutualism is good and provocative.

Everything is verisimilitude; it's just that some things have reality backing them. One powerful method of creating illusory verisimilitude is the "false document". Utilized in the film, "Blair Witch Project", "false document" tips the scales for the viewer making them believe above and beyond the normal suspension of belief. Similar to how "false document" ups the ante if believability, trompe-l'œil is a freakish twist of the eye, where something in a painting to exist in reality due to realistic imagery.

The liar paradox divulges a bizarre lay-out of linguistic trickery with the phrase, "I am lying now" or "This sentence is false". After scrutiny, it's simple to realize that what is implied or intended determines the validity. In other words, if "this sentence is false" is true, then it is false, but if the sentence is false, then the message of the sentence is true.

Different from deception, which connotes guile and malignant dealings, artifice is a craft of cunning, "an artful strategem". Here's the main difference. Deceit generates delusions, false beliefs, while artifice produces delightful awe and inspiration.

Whether it be the "false document" technique of film or novels or the "trompe-l'œil" in paintings, illusions are neither evil nor wrong, but inspiring creations of brilliant art.

I always utilize artifice.

The Father of Acting Wisdom, Tom Hanks: "It's the basic need of all of humankind to be part of something bigger than themselves. As actors we get to create that -- you actually join this gestalt hold. For the rest of us who aren't actors, we do this of us do this by being members of an audience...in Shakespearean times you heard about plays attended by just about everybody...you went to witness this one-time only thing...in the modern era of the power of the cinema, you can't deny that kind of power that actors have is directly translated with these magic boxes, cameras...you are enraptured...you feel a part of a great massive story that impregnates your actuall life as you leave...the thing we are all here for is that we've had seminal moments in which we were part of an audience in which we've had suddenly, the world open up to us and we felt a part of something much, much greater and we said, I want to be a part of that story-telling process...it's the power of the art form...it's lightning in a bottle...it fails when it's supposed to work...it works when it's supposed to fail...but it's so very, very undeniably powerful...it's the power of the cinema...and let's not piss pelicula (the "goddess of everything film") off."

Hanks's brilliance, here, encapsulates the entire experience I've been going through for the past 8 years. But it was constantly phasing in and out. Sometimes I'd be working at a computer desk. Other times I'd be biking or sitting in a classroom as a student. I became confused thinking that I was actually those things -- that I was actually a programmer, a cylcist, or a student. However, I soon discovered that I was simply an actor playing those different roles. Like a cloud that gently wafts up a bird to a different level of the stratosphere, my emotional intention to become part of that story-telling process that produces a sensation of authentic gestalt and enraptured synngergy, carried me and motivated me to play those different "life roles". These "life roles" were guided by my motivation to act, not my interest in those specific activities! I was excited to play soccer, I was excited to finish a paper, I was intrigued by computer science, but those were just dishes in the cuisine of acting. I wavered becaue I thought my life was -- like so many other people do -- just the fettucine or the chicken or the sandwich (just the accounting of the teaching or the athleticism as professions) -- when in reality, it's a cuisine; it's acting.

In reproductive anatomy, the seminal vessicles produce 70% of the fluid in semen. It creates the nutrients, the proteins, the substance for the spermatozoa haploid cell to survie and thrive on it's way to being "born", fusing with the female ovum. Acting is that "seminal fluid"; it's the fundamental juice that enables new life to thrive. Just like every birth needs that seminal fluid, every bit of professionalism thrives within acting. Acting is clarity and minfulness generates action.

Listen Up Fatties (Just Kidding)

People Don't Lose Weight for three reasons. It's question of worth, capacity or understanding.

• Self-Worth -- You don't believe that you deserve to lose the weight.
  
  
• Realm of Possibility/Capacity -- You don't believe it's capable.
  
  
• Knowlede Base/Understanding -- You simply don't know what you're doing.
  

Diets don't work because they're restrictive. When you restrict yourself, you rebel.
If you want to lose weight don't diet. According to Occam's Razor, the answer is always a simple one; dieting is no exception. The answer is not the complex Atkins, South Beach "formulaes". Those lead to yo-yo dieting which increase your chances of heart disease by 70%. The answer is simple. Put down the fork, stop eating, and hit up the gym.

Creating a Motivationalist

An accomplished motivationalist is not someone endowed with answers, but a person gifted in the art of questioning. Take Dr. Phil, for example, someone who interfaces with people as if he has a lot of answers, which he does. His, or any motivationalist's, answers are a product of clarity which comes from seeking, which comes from questioning, which comes from motivation to discover. Therefore, a motivationalist is really simply a motivated "asker-discover" first, and a person dedicated to sharing that clarity, second.

Harmony

I have realized the power of accessing the realization of choice. We all always have the choice to cause certain outcomes. For a LONG period of time I have been trying to make people aware of their limiting belief systems. I would try to be a "Tony Robbins" or some motivational coach that I wasn't. I would provoke people and respond in ways they weren't used to be having people respond. When a security officer would tell me to leave, I would say I would prefer to stay where I was. I would be obdurate obstinate, non-compliant, but never attacking. This shocked some people who were so programmed and patterned into having people respond a certain way because it zapped their life methodology -- their proclivities and tendencies in life. I would basically get people to an aggressive point from which they would try to attack me or bully me. An example is that at a party, I called one kid a pizza face, a dapper dresser, and porcupine head. He didn't even acknowledge the last two things I was saying, but became enraged, saying I didn't respect him, waving his hands and getting viscerally upset about the first observation. I told him that we all have our minds to observe and speak. That's exactly what we must do. We shouldn't hold back our observations -- we have such observations for the purpose of sharing them. However I shared them in ways that got me thrown off a ship, booted off a basketball court, forced to leave a coaching seminar, kicked out of an improv class, booted from a car while driving from Denver to Colorado Springs, the list goes on. The point is that I had such a fervently strong conviction to change people's limiting beliefs that I'd do anything. This was not operating from a safe atmosphere because it created outcomes that I sincerely did not want. I did not want to have an egg on my head after getting punched. I did not want to be put into a cop car. I did not want any of those painful reactions to occur. I realize now my goal is to protect myself, be compliant with people, but be much much much more responsive to their boundaries and to read when they are getting pissed to a limit. I still have a strong desire to have people remove their limiting beliefs (and for me to remove my own limiting beliefs) but to do so in a milieu of compassion, exchange, certainty, safety, and grace instead of just raw effort in challenging belief. Love life to the fullest.

The Cyberpunk Genre

Cyberpunk is defined as a mix of hackers, mega-corporations, and artificial intelligence. Cyberpunk themes arise in many films and books, especially science fiction works. In the Matrix there are
· Hackers (Neo, Morpheus, the Resistance)
· Mega-corporations (Agents, Smith, the programming code of the Matrix) and
· Artificial intelligence (Sentinels, adapting skills of agents, realism of the matrix program).
Always, it is the artificial intelligence that causes the mega-corporations to spawn to dangerously controlling levels, threatening the role of humanity, which is defended by the hackers. In other words, mega-corporations attack humanity, hackers protect humanity, and artificial intelligence allows the mega-corporations to bleed into humanity, making mega-corporations a threat. Without Artificial Intelligence, the mega-corporations would never be adaptive enough to fully adapt and evolve quickly enough to penetrate and threaten mankind. Without hackers, mankind would lack means of responding to the threatening combination of mega-corporation and artificial intelligence.

Other examples of cyberpunk themes in:
George Orwell’s 1984
· Hackers (Winston Smith; Emmanuel Goldstein)
· Mega-Corporations (The Party, Big Brother)
· Artificial Intelligence (Ingsoc, Newspeak)
Although Ingsoc and Newspeak aren’t exactly hardware devices, they are a type of linguistic technology that dangerously perpetuates the Big Brother’s influence. The slogans “war is peace; freedom is slavery; and ignorance is strength” are brainwashing technologies. You can mix and match those combinations, for example, “peace is slavery; war is strength; ignorance is freedom” and create various associations that could be valid in various contexts. If someone is being given cruel and unusual punishment, warring against that could be a form of peace; if freedom is nothing to do, being bound into a slavish regimen could be more productive and, thus, a warped kind of freedom; ignorance of atrocities could be a way of making you stronger, but usually it just debilitates or you could say that ignorance allows less information to clog your natural intuition, resulting in more freedom” etc. The first sentence of the book, “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen” alludes to the bizarre, warped nature of the book, but simultaneous acceptance of it (Orwell 1). Any of those cases can be logically made, with the right linguistic spin and contextual connections. The “hackers” of 1984 must not only understand the technologies of the mega-corporations, but they must manufacture certainty in dissolving it and using it against them. The best trick someone from the hacker allegiance can do is to use the A.I. technologies to their advantage.

The trick about the Matrix is that it is a spiritual battle, not a physical, one necessarily. Some Hindus believe that no one should be trained in everything, which is a waste of time. You can do the jack-of-all-trades and/or the gung fu route, but all knowledge is interesting and good because it can help create freedom.

Albert Camus’s The Plague
· Hackers (Father Paneloux, Dr. Rieux)
· Mega-Corporations (The Plague)
· Artificial Intelligence (The virus itself and indifference)
In a VERY abstract sense, French writer, Albert Camus’s THE PLAGUE could be considered something of the cyberpunk genre, although this is certainly not the typical classification, but an example illustrating how the Hacker-Metacarpi-A.I trifurcation can be stretched to a broad range of genres with a lively enough of an imagination. The “hackers” are simply surgeons, doctors, and people of faith fighting the disease. The mega-corporation isn’t a physical body, here, but the plague represents what most mega-corporations do in the typical cyberpunk novel – they infect. Finally, the indifference to the virus is “artificial intelligence” used in the novel. Again, this is an incredibly abstract connection, but the doctors, the plague, and the virus operate with the same methodology as the typical cyberpunk thriller.


Matrix as a Cyberpunk Parable http://awesomehouse.com/matrix/parable.html
Lots of connections to the bible that are not cheesy references. The three types of maladaptive people are those
· Oblivious -- oblivious to the matrix
· Bored -- bored with freedom (Cypher)
· Tempted -- tempted by the matrix (mouse and the red dress, people who eat lots of candy, people who are tempted by pornography, and “comforts” that make you situated and numb (TV chair holders for all of your TV remotes)
Or, if you are neither of those people, then your aligned:
· Successful – is excited about the challenges of freedom, and continues on connecting with more people on a human level.

These three types of deviations from the Matrix are actually found in the 13th chapter of the Biblical book of Matthew from the New Testament in the “parable of the seeds”. The parable of the seeds discusses the four outcomes from when a sower scatters seeds on the ground. There are the seeds that:

• Do not take root. These seeds drift away in the winds, or are scattered by birds; they are oblivious and never root.
  
• Take shallow roots. These are the seeds that take root in concrete cement, so their rooting is shallow; they are bored and are uprooted easily.
  
• Get tangled in thorns. These are the seeds that take root, but then get entangled in the temptation of thorns; they are tempted and uproot because of that distraction.
  
• The seed takes root. These seeds persevere but are victorious in the end. In the Matrix (Neo, Morpheus, Trinity), in The Plague (Dr. Rieux and Father Paneleux), and in Hackers (Dade Murphy and the other hackers), these people endure pain, but are victorious in the end.
  

Orwell, George. 1984. England: Penguin Books, 1947.
Tavris, Carol and Wade, Carole. Invitation to Psychology. New York: Longman Publishers, 1999.

Buddhist Sangha -- Road to Enlightenment

Religion is just a web of terms concealing nothing. In Buddhism bodhicitta is the “altruistic mind that aspires enlightenment to help others find happiness”. A bodhisattva is someone who has generated bodhicitta, and is already on the path to enlightenment.

How is enlightenment attained?
By knowing and understanding the Three Jewels of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Buddha is the enlightened being, which is explaining what medicine is by saying it’s medicine, so this doesn’t help. Dharma is Buddha’s teachings, or enlightenment teaching, so this is saying enlightenment is attained from teachings of enlightenment, which, again, doesn’t help. Finally, Sangha means our spiritual friends -- the monks and nuns of a spiritual community. If we could identify our Sangha, we really would be getting somewhere, at least, outside redundant, recursive answers because attaining enlightenment with a spiritual community is doable. The first two Jewels said to attain enlightenment by knowing enlightenment and teachings of enlightenment, which is at the least unhelpful, but more equivocating if anything.
Those three Jewels (or 1 Jewel Diamond and 2 redundant Jewels, or pieces of coal) are supposedly all you need to know and take refuge in to reach enlightenment. So, according to these Three Jewels – keystones of Buddhism --we only need to know and take refuge in our spiritual community.

However, another implicit method of attaining enlightenment could be knowing the Ultimate Truth, which is “the way things really are…empty of being...interdependent upon their constituent parts and environment”. Sunyata means emptiness or voidness, how everything is empty of existence, cannot exist alone, and truly is dependent upon each other, so Sunyata is basically the Ultimate Truth because all the Ultimate truth describes is Sunyata. So by knowing the meaning of the synonyms Sunyata and Ultimate Truth we can get closer to enlightenment. But what does Sunyata/Ultimate Truth imply? Outside of all the different mediums of delivering words – Mo (divination prayers), stupas (religious monuments), sutra scriptures, sadhana religious texts, and the like (all which are different ways of delivering a message of enlightenment) -- it implies that, again, this enlightenment is acquired from the spiritual community. We must go to our spiritual community upon which we interdependently need for existence because we do not exist alone. Again, the message is in the Sangha. We are void and existence-less, so we must connect with our Sangha. Clearly, from the Ultimate Truth perspective or the Three Jewel perspective the equation for enlightenment points to Sangha.

Tantra, meaning “continuity”, encourages the practice of developing body, speech, and mind into that of a Buddha. So Tantra encourages achieving enlightened through something similar to Buddha mimicry. But we have no role model to base this mimicry on, so the task is aimed at becoming like Buddha, or becoming enlightenment. Again, the only tangible thing that leads to this area is our Sangha.

Clearly, our Sangha – from the Tantric view, the Three Jewels view, or the Ultimate Truth/Sunyata view – is vital, if not the only method, to achieving enlightenment. Obviously, important questions arise about the nature of this Sangha.

How do we identify our Sangha?
Is it our family? Is it our hometown? The city in which we work? People who randomly share a cab? How big is it? How small? How sentient? Does it last only a few hours and then shift? If we are at a concert with 25,000 other people are we all in the same Sangha? Or are people in the same row in the Sangha? Does it rely on political boundaries for definition? Are Americans in the same Sangha? Or is it that North Americans are in one Sangha and South Americans in another? Or is it hemispheres? Maybe our spiritual friends are in the western hemisphere and another Sangha exists in the eastern hemisphere? Why couldn’t our Sangha be the entire globe or total universe? Clearly, because all those answers seem somewhat ridiculous, or all completely okay, one’s Sangha is not geographically or spatially defined.

If it is not geographically defined, how is our Sangha defined?
Could Sangha be defined by emotions? Sangha could most likely defined with emotional reaction. Emotions are what cannot betray us, but frequently differ from what is going on, but our emotions are signals to action; cries for help, exclamations of joy – they keep us alive. The people we emotionally connect with, are drawn to, are repelled from, are magnetized towards, or that make us feel genuine, ultimately create and shape our spiritual community. But we can be attracted and drawn to negative people, negative temptations, that would certainly not be a spiritual community. And sometimes people that are spiritually not good for us repulse us. So relying on emotional reaction doesn’t seem to work any better than geographical definition.

Sangha is a spiritual community so wouldn’t it have to be defined by how we spiritually connect with people? Wouldn’t Sangha be defined by what our personal spiritual intuition defines as our spiritual community? This makes sense, but, now, of course the question arises, how do we access our spiritual intuition that can select or recognize people in our spiritual community. It seems like the best answer to this is practice. The more practice we get interacting with members of the earth – the grand Sangha – we become more and more aware of how to treat certain people with varying degrees of openness, protection, aggression, generosity, miserliness, and the like. So again, our Sangha is the key to enlightenment and we define and craft our Sangha through practice of interacting with our people, with the grand Sangha, the human community. In short, if you want enlightenment, learn how to live joyously with people.
How can you live joyously with people? First off, you mustn’t act joyous when you are not. Everyone operates in different ways, finds joys through different methods and places, and connects with different locations different. I find joy surfing; others could find joy driving in cars. Driving in cars would not create joy for me, just like surfing may not create joy for another person. So living joyously with people is the key to enlightenment and happiness and living joyously is all about developing your personal relationship with your own tendencies, behaviors, personal likes and dislikes, and things that give your life a boost.
Why is it being attained?
The goal of enlightenment is compassion to free al beings from their suffering.




“Refrain from reading attacks upon yourself so you won’t be provoked” (Philips 75). Knowing this gives us the power to get provoked or to not be provoked. Getting provoked is good if we want to come alive and stir things up and speak our mind, but if we are in a more docile mood and don’t want to go crazy, we simply choose read all attacks as problems the person has with themselves (some inadequacy they are compensating for). This gives us total control if we are being berated to have insults repel off us innocuously and to be provoked by them if we choose.
Philips, Donald. T. Lincoln on Leadership. New York: Warner Books, 1993.


In the Buddhist scriptures it is said, “Because there is this, that ensues. Because this came into being, that came into being. Because there is fundamental ignorance, volitional acts come into being.” (Lama 65). This is referring to the causal nature of karma. I figure this to mean that if some event occurs, it can generate future events to occur if that has potentiality to it. The “Condition of Potentiality” states, “it is not the case that everything can produce everything or anything” (Lama 69). Instead, there has to be some kind of “natural correlation between a cause and its effect” (Lama 69). Dr. Phil writes, you cannot change what you cannot acknowledge, meaning that acknowledge is the key to change and continuing to make correlations between past events creates future acknowledgements, which integrates the past with the present, to be aware of the future, so you can live with the greatest amount of happiness.


Lama, Dalai. A Simple Path. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997.