FREE FOOD Saturday
R E S P E C T
It’s preposterous how I let things, important projects, important letters, forms, calls, just slide away and out of the window of opportunity. Then I create a personality issue like low self esteem or blame. Letting life flow recklessly along without adequate direction is causing me pain.
One step to mitigate this pain problem is to generate an inner sense of peacefulness. To Love inside your heart for yourself and gratitude that you are here now investigating the possibility of inner peace changes thinking. Peace, which you can send out as a general cloud of positive thought feeling and a prayer extended to all the people you encounter and all beings around the globe is a great tool for understanding how to feel peace. What does Peace feel like inside your body and mind?
The ‘Gratitude Attitude’, I first encountered in a meaningful way at a TED slash BIL conference in Monterey, California, either in 2005 or 2006. A very productive and gentle man gave a talk about generating gratitude by using the simple act of the manner you use signing your written communication.
Instead of ending with Sincerely, Best Wishes, or Best, which have lost any meaning and have become an ‘off handed’ thing clunking at the end of the conversation, you can choose to place a thought from your heart.
He impressed me with his valor and the importance for using a communication mode which becomes an action, that both woke the writer up to how very lucky they are, and to wish a good heart attitude (emoticon Hearted), to the reader.
He instructed us to try the experiment of signing our letters and texting with a feeling of goodness; With Respect and Gratitude, or With Gratitude and Respect.
I have adopted this ending for my letters. I feel good that I take a moment to allow myself to rest in the idea of just how lucky I am. Gratitude, not only to be breathing but to be living in a time and place where I am truly grateful for being able to write letters.
The Meaning Of Life
Man Know Thyself! I have heard this my whole life in one way or another. Where should I start? It is such a Gordian Knot of a puzzle! I have tried looking in the mirror to try and see who I am. I mean as though looking in the mirror would let me see under the boundaries I have constructed to swim with the zillions of people, beings, animals, and such that flow along and cross my path. I was hoping that by looking in the mirror I could see beneath the surface, under my skin and deeper than my muscles, sinus, and cells. Man know thyself is asking me to know what part of my complicated structures of my current self in this my Ira Glass idiom, “This American Life”.
Yesterday during my morning meditation, after years of deep wondering, as I have tried to peel the onion of understanding, one layer at a time I had an Ahh Haa moment. I suddenly saw that all the years of study about Dependant Origination snapped to attention.
The Bhavacakra (Sanskrit; Pali: bhavacakka; Tibetan: srid pa’i ‘khor lo) is a symbolic representation of samsara (or cyclic existence) found on the outside walls of Tibetan Buddhist temples and monasteries in the Indo-Tibet region. In the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, it is believed that the drawing was designed by the Buddha himself in order to help ordinary people understand the Buddhist teachings.
The bhavacakra is popularly referred to as the wheel of life. This term is also translated as wheel of cyclic existence or wheel of becoming. ~ Wikipedia
The center of the Wheel of Life holds three animals — the snake representing anger, the rooster, greed and the boar, ignorance – on a background of blue, which is as expansive as the vast open cloudless sky. Blue has, since the end of the Mycenaean culture, been a way to express the vastness of the infinite spacious nature of the human mind. Mycenae was a small fringe settlement dating from around 1600 until 1100 BCE. Most known for the Minoan fine-wear pottery are made from well purified clay of a buff color. The Ancient Grecian Phoenician eyes had not evolved the cones and rods necessary to see Blue. They represented their sky as buff orange.
Surrounding the central animals spinning in a seemingly endless circle of blue are half circles of dark and light areas. On the light side are representations of those seeking to lessen the effects of the poisons and on the dark side are those figures suffering due to the presence and intensity of the three.
I suddenly saw that Man Know Thyself is seeing the actual way that I as an individual express in thought and action my relating out from my personal accumulation of Ignorance. Each person has their own desires and fears which they bounce on to communication with the world. Now again, I feel the vibrating truth of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy!
What To Say About The Holiday Spirit
What to say to people at this season of flaunting religiosity?
I like to include the entire person I am speaking with so I say, “I honor you”. I honor others beliefs, what ever corner of their heart or the world they come from. I might learn some special facet of this man or woman! I hope to do this with a quiet warmth and well mannered grace, a quiet quality that creates a container of quiet for the other person to fill with his or her story. Then when the right moment occurs I might say that I am a JewBuQuackAPrestarianChrisIsm.
Then the conversation in no longer confrontational. It is fun to be opened to life though I might be too exotic to be included in a circle of friendship, where people are a group who all believe the same thing. But I was true to myself. And as I broadened the idea of what is the true holiday conversation, I am not feeling bad.
My friends are not all like me. I look for and like people as they really are and offer my gift of friendship
smile, in recognition that the tiresome overused language that cloth infinity would only build a concrete boundary.
I look forward to Festivus For The Rest Of Us! With the Airing of Grievances, the undecorated poll, and giving wrapped stuff you have in the house that you do not want! What an idea. Topping the experience with meat loaf and spaghetti and ‘red sauce’ and drakes cakes makes this a power preserve day of fun.
just sayin’
AAhhh, It’s a Festivus Miracle!!! The ‘rest of us’ need Festivus!
Need an alternative to the usual Xmas fare? Then create a party or join others to celebrate, “Festivus,” a holiday for the “Rest of Us.”
The origins of this alternative holiday tradition can be dated back to an episode of Seinfeld titled “The Strike”. In this episode Frank Costanza expresses a concern over the increased commercialism and consumerism that tends to saturate the December holiday season.
Festivus Pole
Celebrate Peace: A Simple Practice For This Season
Here comes the holiday season. It is the intersection of dark and light, the shortest amount of daylight transitioning into the growing light. Humanity and Mother Nature herself note this moment with rituals. Deep in the Maple roots, Sap, in its internal cellular aspect starts to generate the future sweetness which will be poured around the world.
So have localities generated a tradition to mark this dark moment and the glory of reaching toward the best and brightest future growth. We are a heliocentric carbon based life form functioning with an electrical charge that is generated from within by our heart beat.
Just imagine the centers of smog and foul air hanging on to the communities in low lying areas. We too carry a factory of potential smog around our bodies as an envelope of thought. If I am in the habit of worrying about the list of my details, will I be able to actually see the solution that is right in front of me. My habit of generating internal worry, anger, fear, and jealousy create a fog of individualism which fights the incoming light.
How, in the season of possible community building, can you and I walk together into the best, most hip and groovy goodness that we long to have, hold, and hug?
I suggest we build Peace and Harmony from the inside out.
It is not complicated but this does take practice to build and use. Sit or stand comfortably and do not do anything special or stiff with your body, mind, or breathing. Just be comfortable and let your ideas and tension sink down into the ground. My Mother taught me such a simple act which she used to remove infection from her body back in the old country just at the turn of the 1900’s. It was a time before antibiotics, telephone, or cars. Back at the very beginning of the dawn of the electronic era when she and the mass of humanity lived from dawn to dusk, she relied on what was known about botanicals to regain health. Some of her practices have fallen out of use and others are gaining a rebirth as useful and natural. For instance she would wrap a cut or wound in spider webs. She claimed it had a penicillin component. I have never looked into this as anything other than an interesting Russian bit of folklore.
But there is a practice she passed on to me that is worthy of applying to our current stress. There is a way of letting the tar and smog of generalized ambient thinking that can be mentally directed into the ground. My Mother would lay down, preferably in the actual soil or right on grass and rest in such a way so all worry stopped. She would direct her body to let the illness or negative emotions to sink into the waiting soil, into the earth itself. To feed the waiting micro societies which turn this into a further sinking lower into the slices of global construction, until the negative thoughts are compressed into and by the molten core of this planet. There are practices which are less Nature Spirited and Pagan than hers.
The Buddhist practice has you sit in meditation and imagine all your negative emotions about family, friends, or coworkers, or even elected officials and their handymen, the police and armies as black tar salamanders that form and migrate out of your bottom into the earth I have read that the Jesuits practice is a wrenching out of the negativity in a barren room after a long period of concentration and contrition.
I suggest that we take a few moments to bring peace into our very core. There truly is peace in every human heart. It is this actual seed of peace that allows you to understand and long for peace and more peace. So say I have peace in my heart. I feel peace in my body. Every cell in my being is at peace. And feel the peace generating the fresh air of a walk in the country. You are no longer in the purple haze smog of negativity and gloom. You have generated your inner light. You are the peace you want.
Peace inside. Breathe as a peace machine, breath in and count in your mind how many numbers you can say easily for your natural in breath. As you easily and in a relaxed manner breath out also counting out the mental numbers but breath out one number longer. This easy breathing in and out will loosen the hold your generated bad feelings have on your nervous system.
The Buddhist practice has you sit in meditation and imagine all your negative emotions about family, friends, or coworkers, or even elected officials and their handymen, the police and armies as black tar salamanders that form and migrate out of your bottom into the earth.
Imagine you have peace in your heart and this peace fills your entire body. At some point you can simply let slip this calm energy of true intention of peace out into the space around your body. It is all you need to do. There is no grand goal. You have ignited your body/heart/mind into a lighted candle of Peace.
Try it !
True Stability
Yes, there is a pointer of thought. Who among us spends more than an occasional moment or gives much thought to just where Thoughts come from? Where do we each place the pointer of our thinking mechanism? Finding this takes real mental effort and emotional control. The difficulty is finding the tip of a thought. Where in your brain and consciousness do thoughts start? Some writers and thinkers have labeled that point a space in time. I once heard a man say that it is a GAP where choice functions. He used the word GAP to give some idea of thinking as a stream of action that has a muscular structure and can be exercised to be in charge of the development of strength and stability of Mind. The vagaries of life happen though I choose the direction to tell my ‘thought’ where and how to travel.
It is like the difference of a cozy relationship and a marriage. How do people make the choice to do more than just visit with one another as humans who are dating and risk being together in cohabitation both physically and financially? The choice might be an emotional space we have all experienced at one level or another. Emotions are easier to understand than thinking.
When I drive, I am calm. It took many years of working on the space between the originating thought and a response either physical as accelerating or breaking or the emotional response which rises my blood pressure or an expression such as honking .
True stability is poise in the GAP. It is an ease with the short view of what is good right here and now in this moment in this lifetime and the long view of how this moment will attract and construct the future of individuals, Nations, and our very planet in the family of stars.
Being moderate and trying to live simply certainly gives me a large screen to view the display of my actions and reactions. I am a beginner.
Peace: A Science Story
What is Peace? Peace is a state of Natural Being in the tornado of Mother Natures creating and deconstructing forms, fluctuations and fashion. Peace is primarily based in and for every cell in my body. This That I AM is in contact with peace from the molten core of our planet continuing in and out to every level of things we see and those just beyond our ocular construction catching colors.
Can you breath it now?
Out to those far reaches of space which humans only can express in equations particles in ever refined, rarefied, and reflecting roll around to be coalesced by the butterfly net of our thoughts. Can you dig it? Humm Didly Diddly Hummm.
I am star dust that is 57.5 billion years old. Last night I attended a political comedy event and the woman sitting next to me, who as crass as broken glass on the beach blabbed demanding that I tell her my age! Of course I smiled and said that a Woman who tells her age cannot be trusted with anything since she will tell every one anything and everything with out a thought of appropriateness! A gentleman two rows back managed to get my attention and quipped You are as old as our current Big Bang System star dust. He made other references based on his membership in the AAAS!
Washington, D.C. office of the Association
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsibility, and supporting scientific education and science outreach for the betterment of all humanity. It is the world’s largest general scientific society, with 126,995 individual and institutional members at the end of 2008,[1] and is the publisher of the well-known scientific journal Science, which has a weekly circulation of 138,549
Black hole gravity pulsations and my beating heart are an orchestra concert held together by each loving thought .
The Beatles sung You are what you eat and All there is Is Love. Love is all there is,
Love is the magnet and the glue
Hawking’s Gravity
How often does Kindness and Intelligence bind harmoniously in one well known person? I had an opportunity to stand next to Dr Stephan Hawking and talk directly to him personally while looking right into his eyes. Both eyes were focused and expressive. In fact I got a whole conversation and wonderful connected sense of grace from our extended glances.
Dr. Stephen Hawking and Dr. Kip Thorne will be presenting a program on Black Holes on Tuesday June 19, 2012 at 8pm at the Flint Center in Cupertino CA.
What I so much wanted to tell him was my unpretentious story about reading a book he authored. I was simply talking to this man who I had admired for most of his life. I told him that some 21 or 22 years ago when his thick volume came out I was living in Princeton N.J. I said that I went into the Young Adult section of the Library and took out the thin young adult version and read it in entirety. That version was in larger print and did not have any of the equations!
It happened that I was standing next to him that perfectly lovely June afternoon. It was at that point that he looked into my eyes and I felt a wave of gratitude coming from him. It was a glance of such tenderness and grace full of real understanding and an appreciation of my honesty, as I was completely unpretentious about reading the children’s copy! My telling the unabashed truth gave me a life long gift of the deep connection with respect for his work though the nuts and bolts are over my head.
The event at the Flint Center in Cupertino CA. Highlighted the extraordinary new proofs of the gravitational spin both in black holes and the collision of two black holes. There in an easy to comprehend power point presentation was the first glimmer of gravitation force. It is more than any other explanation a position for the gravity puzzle
Dr. Stephen Hawking and Dr. Kip Thorne will be presenting a program on Black Holes on Tuesday June 19 at 8pm at the Flint Center in Cupertino CA.
World Wide Rebel: Fear Is Your Only GOD
If you ever wonder what I want from the 99% movement, I will tell you. I am praying and working to pull those who may never get to the first rung of the latter of life, up from where an ever larger population is getting their next meal from a Dumpster. There are people who are worse off than you can imagine, you who are reading blogs on a computer. The Poor, they are living under insurmountable odds. The 99% people are sticking out their necks for the rest of us who are afraid to whisper, say, and shout the unspoken word, “Class”. You are never to mention class or you will be labeled from a long list of words aimed to limit your mental mobility. You could be called a raciest class monger. The Fearful Middle Class who believe they are secure in the consumer Hamster wheel.
The word POOR is never mentioned in any of the Political conversations. All those sleeping in their cars or in allies or under a highway, those who struggle to be optimistic. Poor people do not have a Lobbyist to speak for them to the elected officials in any of the First World Countries, The WHO, The World Bank, NATO, or all those who privatize Water.
Poverty is a crime. Those creative Banking derivatives who sell the flow of cash in seconds from the sender to the receiver make money ‘renting’ this transfer of workers cash. Those who have drained and subverted the global economy through the ‘products’ must be both stopped, taken to task, and incarcerated, yet our leaders are dependent on those same criminals to pay for their nasty commercials.
Listen to this sound track while you read on. I was there at Woodstock 1999 as a Journalist for the Phoenix News of Pennsylvania. I was in the 20th row. I t was more wonderful than this video can ever show, though this is a professionally shot and just wonderful. Put on headphones! (My favorite is Turn Off The Radio and This Is For The People Of The Sun)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnspDgJ8tbQ
Are you standing in line believing the lies, doing what ‘they’ told you with their brain control Bullet in your head? It is an old nightmare that we the 99% will sweep away.
Today, this Friday evening I attended a ‘MeetUp’ gathering, Toasting Berkeley, at a downtown hotel. It was drinks and useless self promotion and drinking and stories…. I do not hold that against any of the assembled or push them away from my heart.
We Are Therefor I Am: “What else are we but a few songs and a few stories“, says, Richard Phillips Feynman, May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988), was an American physicist known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics (he proposed the parton model).
Feynman was a keen popularizer of physics through both books and lectures, notably a 1959 talk on top-down nanotechnology called There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom and the three volume publication of his undergraduate lectures, The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Feynman also became known through his semi-autobiographical books (Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?)
For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman, jointly with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965. He developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions governing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. During his lifetime, Feynman became one of the best-known scientists in the world. (wikipedia)
Back to my adventure with the over tidy at my gathering…Near the end of the hour and a half, the conversation turned to how (those who were at my end of the long table), thought about contact with protestors. It was spewing out the oft repeated FOX news sort of comments. One woman was saying that the few who had to cross the lines of the Occupy Movement protestors in San Francisco City Hall, called the assembled ‘dirty’ HOMELESS rotten residue who should be removed. I just felt that the group I was with actually believed that the protestors are less than Human! There was special viscera especially for the Berkeley and Oakland groups. All 99% are all tossed together into a “All Those There”.
The shaking and starving are our human brothers. Until the least of us is sheltered and clothed and fed, we are not truly living up to the persons we were born to be. We are all our brothers keepers. LOVE Is All There Is!
Rewiring the System 