16 March 2006

'twas a sunny day
Not a cloud was in the sky....
(Paul Simon)

LOVE 2

H, MY GOSH! It's been raining here in Hilo, almost 24/7, without a peep of sunlight for days on end.... Time to call on those weather-gods: please, let's all start singing, "'twas a sunny day"!!

GOOD. Now that that's handled ... I have a short story that relates to our previous topic of Love. It was told to me years ago, by a friend in Oregon. She had a friend who had been captured and held prisoner by the Germans in World War II.

This man had been captured ... and every day his German guards would come to his cell and beat him. I don't know if they were trying to get information from him, or if the beatings were just their form of entertainment. Anyway, the man had a revelation: that the way to deal with this was to accept it totally, not to resist the beatings in any way, and not to hate the men who were beating him.

He deliberately generated feelings of love for them, in fact! He forgave them for the beatings, and he filled himself with love for them. (In the terminology of Thadeus Golas, we could say he was vibrating at the space-level, and putting himself in the same space as his tormentors.)

Guess what happened! He soon found that any damage done to him by the beatings would be healed overnight. The guards would come to his cell the next day, and be flabbergasted to find him looking healthy and unmarked! They would beat him again, worse than before -- and, when they came back the day after that, again they found him totally healed.

Before long, they began to get the idea that their efforts were wasted on him. They were getting no satisfaction from beating him; quite the opposite, they were getting nothing but frustration. It was downright spooky, in fact, to leave him bruised and bleeding, and to come back the next day and find him smiling at them, without a mark on his body!

They stopped doing anything to him. And so he was left in peace. He still had the miserable conditions of his captivity to deal with, the filth and the cold and the lack of food (there was so little food, even the Germans were going hungry) -- and yet he had learned to generate an enduring state of peace and even blissfulness for himself. In fact, while his captors were sinking into hunger and despair, he actually learned how to nourish himself without the need for physical food!

My friend didn't know exactly how he accomplished this, but it seemed to be through some revelation related to the one about loving his torturers. He learned to nourish himself, either from the environment or from within, without eating physical food.

Eventually the War ended, and he was released -- and he never again ate physical food! It simply wasn't needed.

In later years, my friend said, the man had appeared several times on television -- I recall her mentioning The Tonight Show; I'm not sure if there were others. She said, she had watched him on TV, demonstrating to Johnny Carson his ability to heal wounds; that he would cut his arm on-camera, for instance, cut it deeply -- and then, with just the power of his mind, he would heal the cut completely, in the span of maybe a minute.

I never saw any of this myself, but I never had the slightest reason to doubt the truth of it. I've heard and read stories of similar abilities, from credible sources, and I never had any reason to suspect that my friend was pulling my leg, nor that she herself had been fooled about this.

Definitely food for thought, wouldn't you say...?

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13 March 2006

There's nowhere you can be that isn't where
You're meant to be --
It's easy....
(Lennon - McCartney)

LOVE

photo © 2006 William Kendrick 

What better expression of Love,
than snow in Arizona, after 143 days of drought!!
(click image to see, full-size, in new window)

One of my all-time favorite books, The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment, came to mind when I started writing this ... and I re-read some bits of it, for the first time in a few years, and would like to quote a few passages here, which relate to Love as a state-of-being:

We are equal beings and the universe is our relations with each other. The universe is made of one kind of entity: each one is alive, each determines the course of his own existence.
. . . .
The basic function of each being is expanding and contracting. Expanded beings are permeative; contracted beings are dense and impermeative. Therefore each of us, alone or in combination, may appear as space, energy, or mass, depending on the ratio of expansion to contraction chosen, and what kind of vibrations each of us expresses by alternating expansion and contraction. Each being controls his own vibrations.

A completely expanded being is space. Since expansion is permeative, we can be in the "same space" with one or more other expanded beings. In fact, it is possible for all the entities in the universe to be one space.

We experience expansion as awareness, comprehension, understanding, or whatever we wish to call it. When we are completely expanded, we have a feeling of total awareness, of being one with all life. At that level we have no resistance to any vibrations or interactions of other beings. It is timeless bliss, with unlimited choice of consciousness, perception, and feeling.
. . . .
When a being is totally contracted, he is a mass particle, completely imploded. To the degree that he is contracted, a being is unable to be in the same space with others, so contraction is felt as fear, pain, unconsciousness, ignorance, hatred, evil, and a whole host of strange feelings. At an extreme he has the feeling of being completely insane, of resisting everyone and everything, of being unable to choose the content of his consciousness. Of course, these are just the feelings appropriate to mass vibration levels, and he can get out of them at any time by expanding, by letting go of all resistance to what he thinks, sees, or feels.

When a being is alternating expansion and contraction, he is energy. My guess is that at the middle point, fifty percent expansion and fifty percent contraction, a being would be logical, non-subjective, egoless, and predictable. This may be the "zero" which is one side of energy equations in physics, as well as the "ego-death" we go through in expanding to higher levels of awareness.

It is important to note that energy is not a quantity of anything "objective." Energy, like space and matter, is what a lot of live beings are doing. Energy beings usually react to their neighbors in a way that is often predictable and apparently automatic, like falling dominoes. While relating to space beings, energy beings will appear to be high, vibrating rapidly, with a sense of increasing subjective freedom. Oriented to mass beings, they will be low energy, vibrating more slowly with a growing feeling of subjective compulsion and disorder.

The universe is an infinite harmony of vibrating beings in an elaborate range of expansion-contraction ratios, frequency modulations, and so forth.
. . . .
What we need to remember is that there is nobody here but us chickens. The entire universe is made of beings just like ourselves. Every particle in every atom is a live being. Every molecule or cell is a tribe of beings. Energy is a large number of us vibrating together. Space is an infinite number of our brothers and sisters in perfect bliss.

There is no important difference between live and dead matter, since both are made up of live entities. Not only is mass convertible into energy, but energy is convertible into space, and vice versa. It is our own withdrawal from awareness, our own mass condition that makes us see our brothers and sisters as objective matter, energy, and space. We always have the experiences and perceptions appropriate to our vibration level.

The same rules apply to all of us. The rules do not come from anywhere outside ourselves. They come from the truth that we are all equal, we all have the same range of possible behavior and experience. We are free to do anything we want to do, within the necessary laws of our relations as equal beings. And love must be the first law. [emphasis mine] Love is the action of being in the same space with other beings, which means that love is real, as real as we are. Love is not a limited idea, it is something we do, ultimately with our whole selves.

. . . .

What does it mean, to be whole? It means that we must be willing to conceive of, to contain within ourselves, whatever is "other than" any limited idea. It means knowing that when we emphasize a positive, we are at the same time creating a negative. When we choose an ideal of knowledge, then we must deal with the ignorance that is other than the knowledge. When we emphasize an ideal of holiness, then we must live with the sin that is its companion, and accept our responsibility for having created it.

If we deny doing so, that is a contraction of awareness; we become dense, we become mass-level entities, we are incarnated in physical bodies. And we cannot control what we have denied creating, it is forced into our attention whether we like it or not, and so we live in a world of sin and ignorance.

However, if we remain constantly open and unresisting to such negatives, we are not compelled to dwell on them: If we allow that ugliness is always within us, then we are free to create beauty. If we know that stupidity is always within us, then we are free to emphasize this intelligence.

[emphasis mine] Love is the highest and holiest action because it always contains that which is not love within itself, it always and ever moves to include the unloving.

SO. THIS STATE-OF-BEING called Love transcends liking and disliking. It's a matter of expanding our own awareness enough, not to exclude or resist things we dislike or even hate. Everything arises from the Life-Source; and how could that Source exclude or deny any of its own creations? The possibility of such a thing would contradict the very nature of reality, it seems to me!

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12 March 2006

Vote For Martha!

ELL, the Bare Naked Ladies are gone already.... My latest website client (Martha) sent me a jumbo-size, head-and-shoulders photo of herself, for her website ... and I liked it so much, I cropped a super-close-up of it, which I downsized to fit my 800 x 600 desktop. The funny thing is, Martha herself doesn't like the picture, and says her friends don't like it either!

She pointed out to me that it's normal for people not to like pictures of themselves. Okay, I concede that. But I can't imagine anyone else not liking this picture, it's so beautifully natural and sweet and full of LIFE!! So I asked her to let me post it here, and to ask for viewers' opinions of it. She said yes, and even went a step further: she would send more pictures, I would pick my favorite of them, and then post both it and the original one.

So, I've done that; now it's your turn to pick your favorite of the two. Here they are:

Martha #1

Martha #2

And here's my cropped, desktop version of #1
(not included in the voting)

In case you're interested, here's Martha's website (in the early stages of being constructed).

YOU KNOW, I said before that the "erotic photos" were like opening a bag of potato chips: it was almost impossible to eat just one. Now it has occurred to me just how good an analogy that is -- because erotica really is, just as potato chips are, junk food. Very seductively, it excites the taste buds -- but the excitement soon fades and leaves you wanting more. You take another bite, there's the momentary excitement again, and it's gone again. Just the way a potato chip seduces the taste buds. You could eat a truckload of them -- potato chips or "erotic photos" -- and never feel satisfied. In fact, after maybe half a truckload, you'd feel a bit nauseated. And you wouldn't want any more junk food for a while -- not until your memory of it had faded, at least.

AND ... we have bigger, more alluring things to grapple with, anyway. Such as: GOD. And: LOVE.

My mother was "really sorry" that I said, "I no longer believe in God". So, I need to do a little more explaining about that : ^ ).

So. Here goes. I'll title this:

GOD

I tried explaining it to my mother this way:

It seems to me, a large part of our differing on this subject is just a matter of semantics: what you call God, I call Life or Source. The difference, to me, is that I don't personify Life or Source. The idea that "God" or "gods" created human beings in his/their own image, I think, is really just a bit of human arrogance. I think human beings created "God" in THEIR own image! It seems to me, all religious revelations and writings are simply the interpretation of what various people have received from the fundamental energy of Life or Source -- and, instead of realizing that this Life or Source comes from absolutely within themselves, they have externalized and personified it, and made it an object of worship and fear ... plus putting words in its mouth about all kinds of human activities that people should and shouldn't be doing (making war on those identified as "enemies", etc....).

It's a very convenient way of making rules and controlling people, while putting the responsibility for the rules (and for the "punishment" that comes when the rules are broken) on "God"....

Then she wrote back: "Very interesting, BUT who do you think created the earth and all within?"

And I answered: "I don't think it was a Who; I just call it Source or Life...."

I agree with Carlos Nakai, that God/Source/Life is infinitesimally tiny, and therefore omnipresent; and I feel, intuitively, that it exists in its own dimension, at the very heart of every particle of matter -- and, from there, it gives existence and life to every particle of matter.

I don't believe that this Life-Source is the vindictive God of the Jewish and Christian bibles (Who seems very clearly to be simply a reflection of the vindictiveness of the people for whom those books were written). I don't believe the Life-Source passes judgment on its creations, nor that it would order the destruction of them (whereas the biblical God seems to delight in setting one group of people against another; as some have pointed out, for example, the magnitude and the depravity of the killing in the Book of Numbers alone -- including whole nations of helpless and innocent infants -- makes, by comparison, all the atrocities of our modern World Wars pale into insignificance).

It seems to me that the Life-Source is much too intelligent, and much too compassionate, to fall into these peculiarly-human traps. It seems that the totality of its creation is perfectly (and neutrally) self-adjusting; that our every thought and word and action gives rise, automatically, to its own exact justice. There is no need for anything outside ourselves to hand out rewards or punishments; we generate those, impeccably, ourselves. Every step leads to the next one, and every particle of existence interacts with every other particle, to manifest the totality of the miracle of Life.

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1 March 2006

MARCH IS UPON US already! I always feel cheated when I get to the end of February, and there are only 28 (usually) days! (And, every year, I forget that, so I'm surprised anew.)

BUT ... before the Gregorian calendar, every month was only 28 days -- and we had 13 months a year.*

Bare Naked Ladies!

Ev'rythin's up to date in Kansas City
They've gone about as fur as they c'n go!
They got a big theayter they call a burleeque
Fer fifty cents you c'n see a dandy show....
(Rodgers and Hammerstein)

Y LIFESTYLE OF one-continuous-day becomes a bit overwhelming sometimes, and I start to feel I've been "working" too much. I start craving an interlude of mindless escapism (not even consciously, sometimes).

That was my condition late Sunday night. I was exploring del.icio.us (described in the previous entry) a bit more ... one link leading to another, to another ... until I found myself gazing at a whole list of bookmarks to "erotic photo" pages.

It was a tantalizing idea. I couldn't even remember the last time I had an erotic thought! And, with a click of the mouse, I was "down the rabbit hole," so to speak....

Once you make that first click, it's like opening a bag of potato chips and eating the first one. You're not likely to stop anytime soon. I've found this to be especially so with the internet: the very structure of it being addictive, such a galaxy of links, leading in all directions ... and we're always just one link away, potentially, from the fulfillment of any quest!

In the case of "erotic photos," the seduction factor is multiplied. The very word erotic gives us pleasant tingles -- because we're inhabiting physical, sexual bodies; and because, in our modern, Brave-New-World culture, anything erotic is also slightly taboo (which makes it all the more exciting, and guilt-producing at the same time!).

SO. Down the rabbit hole I went. It was about midnight when I started ... and what brought me to my senses again was the daylight of Monday morning coming in the windows!

I deliberated a lot on whether to write about this. My previous entry having dealt with the rising tide of openness and honesty we're all riding now, and the growing attitude of no-secrecy, my first impulse was to write it. This is, after all, a journal of my life, and the "erotic photo" episode seemed, as grist for the mill, just as valid as any other. It seemed perfectly natural and reasonable to include it here.

Then came the guilt-and-fear aspect. This would surely be a shocking disclosure to some people, who have a very one-sided perception of me (through no fault of theirs, or of mine, simply that they know only one side of me). And I was also feeling the weight of all that mass-consciousness guilt, for spending hours looking at "erotic photos" in the first place (though, to be accurate, I must say that most of the time was spent twiddling my thumbs and thinking of other things, while waiting for the pages to load).

Anyway, if you're reading this now, you know I decided to write it : ^ ). The fear-and-guilt aspect was in fact what compelled me to do so! After having written my previous entry, I would feel not totally honest if I did not write about this. And, if I were to let the fear of alienating or disappointing people keep me from writing it, I would feel much worse yet. That would be cause to feel genuine guilt! So, here goes....

THE FIRST THING I have to report about my adventure is that I was quite pleasantly impressed (and surprised!) by the quality of what I found. Everything I looked at was of excellent technical quality; and, with few exceptions, the photos were truly erotic and tastefully done.

What also surprised me was the size of them. Most were bigger than my computer screen (well, okay, I know 800-by-600 screens are considered puny nowadays -- but still....). And some were absolutely enormous! Seeing this, one of the first thoughts that came to mind was: "By Jove, these would make splendid desktop backgrounds for the computer!"

Always before, my backgrounds have been beautiful nature scenes. Well, maybe it's time for a change. Also, I couldn't help thinking of the inevitable association of women with Mother Earth herself -- and that women's bodies are no less beautiful than hers.

With that in mind, I set off in search of the best background images I could find. Along the way, I was confronted by such thoughts as: "This is really the nadir of your descent into the cyber-world." "How long before you stop eating, and merely search for pictures of food on the web?" And, of course, that old cliché, "You need to get away from the computer screen and GET A LIFE!!" Which is a thought that has occurred to me many times. I think about the direction our civilization is headed -- children nowadays being raised by computer screens and TV screens more than by their parents; children hardly even going outdoors to play, because they're transfixed in front of a glowing screen; and the experiments already taking place with "artificial intelligence" and the physical incorporation of computer circuitry into the human body. I think about these things ... and I would rather not think about them, because the possibilities are more-than-a-little scary. So I end up leaving the future in the hands of Life itself, or, more accurately, the unknown Source from which Life arose -- and focusing my attention back on the Here and Now....

And, here and now, this IS my life. The great river of cyber-space carries me with it, just as it carries our whole civilization. The computer is my connection to thousands of people, all over the world, with whom I would have no interaction otherwise. The cyber-world fits my nature, in fact; so, for the present, this is where I spend most of my time.

The thoughts came and went, and I kept plugging along. One link kept leading to another. I kept following the tributaries of the great river ... waiting for those pages to load (someone ought to tell the people who make them, it wouldn't hurt anything to put a lot less content on each page -- like, maybe, about a tenth as much!).

I suppose they make such big pages merely because they have so incredibly many photos! I'm used to having my mind boggled by the astounding quantities of EVERYTHING on the web -- still, I have to say, the absolutely countless number of Bare Naked Lady pictures out there is way beyond even mind-boggling. The word that kept coming to mind was UN-BE-LIEVABLE!! Even the number of links to more and more pages (which, undoubtedly, are themselves each linked to more and more pages yet, etc.) was unfathomable.

This whole adventure also brought to mind those who love to preach about the demeaning of women, the exploitation of them, by evil men with cameras, offering Satanical bribes to photograph them naked. Well, I gotta say, if that's the case, there sure are boatloads-full of women eager to be exploited!

Poor things, they're forced into it, they have no other way to make a living! Well, the ones I saw looked very healthy and fit, and capable of doing many kinds of work; maybe they chose to be photographed because it's much easier and more enjoyable than other jobs, and because it pays better....

Is it any more evil to pay a woman for taking off her clothes, than to pay her for making executive decisions (the decision to close down a factory, for example, putting hundreds of people out of work [so that she and her fellow-executives don't have to reduce their obscenely-gigantic salaries], or to cut down a forest, or to pollute a river)? I wonder how the sermonizers would answer that....

I wonder what they would say about Anaïs Nin, the famous author, a brilliant and very complex woman herself, whose reputation was made by her writing of erotica. Or, going back much further, what about the legendary female writer-composer Sappho (to whom statues were erected in honor)? Ah, well, I suppose we do know what the sermonizers would say about her: the "L" word!! They would probably dismiss Ms. Nin with that, also, considering she had a fling with it herself.

What about the popularity (with both men and women) of erotica, whether pictures or words, throughout history? I do believe the attraction of such things comes as standard equipment with the physical, sexual, human body. And I would bet any sum of money that the total amount of exploitation of women by men, when all is said and done, will exactly equal the total amount of exploitation of men by women -- because we live in a universe that seems to be infinitely self-adjusting around a single, supreme element, which is: BALANCE. No one is a victim of anyone else.

Well, then ... I did end up getting some nice background images. Some of them I was even able to improve, by artful cropping. Yes, they're nice, for a change -- even though I reckon I'll be going back to the nature scenes after a while. Somehow, those do hold my interest more.

ODDS & ENDS:

In the Definitely-NOT-erotic category: In case you've been wondering what the "side effects" of Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra were going to be -- how about blindness? That, at least, is what certain law firms are charging now; I heard one of them on the radio, casting a net to round up "victims," for the purpose of a class-action lawsuit.

In the Brave-New-World category: something called the Genesis Experiment (not to be confused with the book of the same name) -- which is asking for your participation, before March 10th.

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* Some folks, like those at www.13moon.com, are taking steps to return to a natural, 13-month calendar....

25 February 2006

Blogs and Buzzwords

One sweet dream
Pick up the bags, get in the limousine
Soon we'll be away from here
Step on the gas and wipe that tear away
One sweet dream came true today
(Lennon - McCartney)

O TELLING WHY THOSE LYRICS came suddenly to me -- but they did, and now that song has been playing in my head for more than a whole day....

Who knows where any of our thoughts or ideas really come from? I thought I might find a clue in the origin of the word "idea" itself. I found that the word "derives from the Greek word eidos, 'the appearance of a thing' (thanks to one Suzanne E. McCarthy) -- which still doesn't tell us where these things appear from. Maybe all ideas arose at the nano-instant of the creation of EVERYTHING, the instant the original dot was put in the original circle. Maybe they've all been circulating since then, in what we call consciousness, and we just naturally attract the ones we need, when we need them.... It usually seems that way to me -- though this one has me mystified, so far.

My intended subject for today is a look at the phenomenon of blogging; a look at the whole trend toward -- what can we call it? -- the publicize-ation of our lives.

Years ago, for a span of several years, I wrote a personal journal. That was back in the days of typewriters(!!) -- and I put the typed pages between sturdy brown covers; and, when the stack was a couple inches thick, I would make it a book, and then start on the next book. I accumulated lots of these journal books. The idea of making them publicly available would have seemed outrageous to me then. But here I am, many years later, actually publishing a new set of daily scrawlings, for the whole world to see.

And I'm certainly not alone in this. The number of blogs in the blogosphere is mushrooming so rapidly, it's a good thing (or is it?) that we have high-speed computers, in order to count them all! (Here's a guy who says, as of May 2005, there were over 60 million blogs worldwide; and Technorati, which is just one of the many blogging directories, is currently tracking "over 75,000 new weblogs created every day, which means that on average, a new weblog is created every second of every day....")

Years ago, when the afternoon talk-shows on TV began baiting people to come on and reveal the most intimate aspects of their lives -- and people were actually doing it! -- it was entirely disgusting to me. But now, the question must be asked: Was that really so different than all this blogging?

It seems to me, blogs are what trash TV has evolved into. And, surprisingly to myself, I've come to see this whole trend as a positive indication (even given that the content and the caliber of writing in most blogs is on the same level as their trash-TV ancestors). It's positive because it shows that we're becoming comfortable enough with who we are, that we're not afraid of letting others know the truth about us.

In the old days, people divided themselves much more, into public and private personas. Most of us still do that to some extent, but we're inching away from it -- and I think that's good. We're becoming more honest in that way; willing to say to the world, "This is who I am, and, if you don't like it, that's your problem!"

The Australian Aborigines tell us the key to mental telepathy is precisely that: keeping nothing secret from anyone. And it seems indeed that we're becoming more telepathic. I have no doubt that our growing honesty -- our transparency -- is the reason. Transparency is the perfect word for it; we used to be more opaque, now we're becoming transparent.

It's all part of the universal surfacing of long-buried truths. We're seeing this everywhere we look: our legal system, educational system, economic system, and government in general -- the corruption and the outright lies, which have held these things together for so long, are now being exposed; the "glue" is dissolving, and everything fraudulent is beginning to disintegrate.

This is no less true in our personal lives. Like it or not, the opaque and the fraudulent parts of us are falling away, and the truth is being revealed for all to see. We're blogging like crazy ... and it's as if we've begun to see ourselves not so much as separate organisms, but more as individual cells in one all-encompassing creature. We're starting to realize that nothing about us -- not even our thoughts -- is really "ours"; that everything is community property; that we were all just electrons, interlinked in a World Wide Web, long before the invention of the internet.

On one hand, more and more of us are choosing to share our intimate thoughts with the world -- and, on the other hand, Big Brother is doing whatever he can to listen-in-on, and photograph, and otherwise spy-on, us. Big Brother is trying to maintain his own opacity while enforcing transparency on the rest of us (with spy-satellites, electronic eavesdropping, RFID [Radio Frequency Identification] chips, cameras-cameras-cameras EVERYWHERE, etc.) -- and it just ain't gonna work that way. The more they struggle to impose control on others, the faster (and more dramatic) will be the disintegration of the control-freaks themselves. The big lesson in all this is: we are truly, inescapably, all in the same boat -- and heading for the open waters of Transparen-Sea.

HAVING RECENTLY STARTED this blog, I've been learning a bit about the workings of the blogosphere in general, and the direction the internet seems to be headed. Beyond the current proliferation of methods for syndicating website content -- RSS, Atom, and a few others, whose names I've already forgotten -- the next big thing seems to be community-based-information sites.

The first one of these I heard of, del.icio.us, describes itself as "social bookmarking." It started as a way for people to easily access their favorite websites when away from their own computers; instead of (or in addition to) "bookmarking" a site in their own browser, people would create an account at del.icio.us, and save the bookmark there. Then, when they were away from their own computer, they could access their list of bookmarks via any computer.

Given the proliferation of ever-smaller, ever-more-mobile computers, the question arises: When is anyone ever away from his/her own computer nowadays? In any case, the del.icio.us idea has indeed caught-on. More than just that, it's become a way for people to share their bookmarks. It's become, in effect, a new kind of search engine: you type in a keyword relating to something you're looking for, and up comes a list of every web page bookmarked by any member of the del.icio.us community and associated with that keyword. Also, a list of other keywords, which del.icio.us members have associated with each of those web pages.

Clicking on any one of the additional keywords takes you to the complete list of sites associated with that word; and clicking on the moniker of any member (who has created one of these bookmarks) takes you to the full list of his/her bookmarks. (It can get a bit confusing!) You can even set yourself up (using an RSS feed) to be notified automatically whenever a particular member adds a bookmark to his/her list!

I actually read an article in which the author was touting this approach as the search engine of the future. He pointed out that people just might prefer being directed to websites by a community of their peers, rather than by a corporation and its web-crawling spiders and secret algorithms! I reckon that's a valid point -- though, the flip side is that, at least as of now, the "social bookmarking" approach racks up only a minuscule fraction of the information available through any of the major search engines. Just for kicks, I searched for "bookmarks" on both del.icio.us and Google: 18,000 results on del.icio.us -- 164,000,000 on Google!! Of course, the flip side to that is that no one looks beyond the first 10 or 20 of those 164,000,000 entries anyway (though, with 164,000,000 in the database, the first 10 or 20 may well be of higher quality than their counterparts on the bookmarking sites).

Whatever the wave of the future turns out to be, it seems that Yahoo, for one, is quite infatuated with the social bookmarking idea. They have now "acquired" del.icio.us from its creators -- and, in addition, have created a clone of it, called My Web 2.0 (currently a BETA incarnation; BETA being techo-talk for something that's still having the bugs worked out of it). (Gee, I guess that means that every Microsoft product is in perpetual BETA!)

The term Web 2.0 is another buzzword itself. There seems to be no real definition of it, just a nebulous sense that it probably involves the new syndication methods -- RSS, XML ("Extensible Markup Language"), Atom, etc. -- and the creation of information-communities (such as del.icio.us).

All of this confirms, again, the increasing realization of ourselves as interdependent organs in one great organism (or is that interdependent cells in one great organ? ... or interdependent organelles in one great cell? ... or ...?)

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23 February 2006

One More aH-Ha!

OU KNOW HOW, sometimes, something can be so familiar to you, it becomes invisible...? Here's an example:

Since having these recent realizations about the location of the Source-dimension, within physical matter -- and starting to write about them in these pages -- I've been consciously pulling-in Source-energy from that dimension, and releasing it in the physical, for a while every day. I do it by breathing: bringing in the Source-energy with the in-breath, releasing it with the out-breath ... and suddenly it occurred to me, Hey -- this is basically Hatsureiho!!

Then I corrected that -- no, it's not even Hatsureiho, it's Joshin Kokkyu-ho!

Those are the Japanese names for 2 breathing exercises, both of which have become part of the Reiki method. Joshin Kokkyu-ho translates as "Purifying-spirit Breathing-method", and Hatsureiho as "Generating-spirit method." Hatsureiho is merely Joshin Kokkyu-ho plus an additional element. Both exercises accomplish -- guess what! -- the pulling-in of Source-energy, followed by radiating it out!

The reason I didn't make the connection, at first, is that the 2 Reiki exercises are based on the concept of pulling the Source-energy from the environment, from around and above us, not from within us. Exactly like so many other exercises, and whole disciplines, philosophies, religions, etc., these 2 have taught us to believe that the Source is outside us!

The fact is, they are both effective, even with that concept. Sure, we can pull Source-energy from the environment -- because the Source-energy is present there (it's present within every molecule of the physical dimension, and every molecule is radiating some of it outward, into the environment). We can pull, into ourselves, the Source-energy that other beings, around us, are radiating-out ... and then radiate it outward ourselves, again. But that's only Recycling. It doesn't add anything to the picture (and we can see that the so-called "Generating-spirit method" is actually misnamed; it doesn't generate anything).

However, we also have the ability of consciously tapping the infinite stream of Life-energy, within us, and then radiating that outward, to enhance the life all around us. Doesn't it seem better to do that? Only we've been taught to believe we can't do that, because the Source is not within us, but outside us!

WHY SHOULD WE believe that? We've been taught, over and over, in countless ways, that the 2 most powerful beings in existence are not only outside us, they're also having a cosmic game of ping-pong, with us being the ping-pong balls! There's GOD, eternally above us, and SATAN, eternally below us -- making sort of a sandwich -- and Humankind is the chopped-liver, so to speak, caught between the two. We're the liverwurst ... and we're definitely living the worst of the situation!

But why should we believe in these cosmic giants, above us and below us? What if, in reality, they're both OUR creations, not the other way around? What if ... there's only one Source of everything in existence ... and it lives in a non-physical dimension within the physical -- at the center of every particle of the physical? What if, in reality, the only war between Good and Evil is in the human imagination (and then, of course, imagining it, we make it real)?

It feels much more accurate, to me, that we are simply physical extensions of the non-physical Source-dimension, which lives (in total peace, not at war with anyone) within every nano-particle of our being....

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22 February 2006

aH-Ha!

NO LONGER BELIEVE in God. The concept of God seems to have outlived its usefulness; seems to have no basis in reality. It seems to me, the evolution of consciousness is dependent on continuously checking our concepts against our experience of reality ... and continuously re-shaping the concepts, to fit.

Holding onto concepts that no longer fit reality brings us not only to a standstill, it contributes to our actual devolution. So, for the sake of reality, I've had to let go of the concept of God, along with the concepts of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny (I'm still holding an option on the Tooth Fairy! : ^ ).

I can trace the beginning -- or at least one beginning -- of my re-shaping of God, to something said by R. Carlos Nakai, the renowned Native American flute player. It was in the early 1990s (over a decade ago!) that I saw him perform in Cedar City, Utah. He started the program with some humorous banter ... and he was talking about how his People -- living off the land, as they had until the incursion of the White Man -- had had lots of time for sitting around and contemplating the nature of things ... and they had reached the realization that God was either infinitely bigger than us ... or that God was infinitely smaller than us. He said they had decided it was more likely that God was infinitely smaller -- which accounted for God's ability to be present everywhere at once!

I've never forgotten that; and, at the moment he said it, I was struck by one of those internal lightning bolts (the feeling that some people refer to as "goose bumps" or "chicken skin") -- one of those aH-Ha! moments -- which always seem to designate that we are in the presence of a great and profound Truth.

That particular Truth started re-shaping my concept of God, on that day in Cedar City, and it has now brought me to the letting-go of the whole concept of God. Now, I simply say, "Dear Infinite Source, filling and overflowing, from within, every particle of existence...."

Speaking of aH-Ha! moments -- it's no accident that we call them that. Those very sounds (aH and Ha) hold great, fundamental significance for us. They are primal, pre-human sounds, involved with the very basis of life. In various cultures, aH is felt to be the sacred vibration of Source itself; and Ha is the expansion of the Light-of-Life, or the radiating-out of the Breath-of-Life.

Our most fundamental action in life is breathing; and it seems to me that aH and Ha correlate exactly with our in-breath and out-breath, respectively -- aH is breathing-in Life itself, from the Source-dimension within us; and Ha is expanding that Source-energy outward.

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21 February 2006

Back to Inner Tech

LITTLE MORE on the subject of Inner Tech, if you don't mind.... The term itself is interesting to me, because it just came into my head one day. I was contemplating how to name the feeling I had, that everything exists within us, and that what we call "technology" is merely our attempts to replicate that inner technology in the outer world -- and the words "Inner Tech" came into my mind.

Now, having used the term "Inner Tech" here on this blog, imagine my surprise when, just to see what would happen, I typed it into the search field of my Google toolbar....and discovered that Google had received 3,560,000 (3-million 560-thousand) searches for "inner tech" (and zero for "inner technology")!! Clearly, a lot of other people have been getting similar ideas, from somewhere....

The main revelation, as I said, came through my practice of Reiki, and it was that Reiki's effectiveness is not a matter of radiating energy outward, but of awakening the innate Source-energy within. Now I feel sure this is the case with Reiki, Johrei, and any other kind of "universal" energy healing; that it's not a process of the energy coming into us from outside, and then our "beaming" the energy to someone else. It's a process of PULLING Source-energy from the other dimension, within! Wherever we direct Reiki, for example, we're actually drawing Source-energy from within that place -- from within another dimension, at the very center of every particle there.

I mentioned, before, the feeling that this is what occurs in every particle of everything in existence; it's what gives everything Life (and the practice of things like Reiki, Johrei, etc., is a way of enhancing this pulling of energy, returning the strength of it to its original, natural level). I mentioned, as one example, the Sun pulling Source-energy from within itself.

It seems evident that the Sun, as the center of our cosmic neighborhood, would be the undisputed champion of such activity; and I'd like to relate a personal anecdote, which I believe confirms it. Years ago I had a friend who did a lot of astral travel.* He liked especially to go exploring outer space, and the planets. I remember him telling me about his visits to the Sun. He said the Sun made a constant, deafening, sucking sound! This was quite an amazing bit of news to me, and it seemed so contrary to my concept of the Sun as a creature whose business was to radiate outward. It didn't occur to me, at the time (DUHHH!), that the Sun would have to be constantly pulling-in, from somewhere, the energy it was radiating-out! Now, my feeling is that the sucking sound heard by my friend was the Sun pulling energy from the Source-dimension within itself!

Something else about the Sun: did you know that the strength of the Sun's magnetic field has doubled in the past 40 years?! That's what they say, over in the Science Department. Likewise for the other planets in our solar system -- except for the magnetic field of the Earth, which has decreased.

And what about the sucking action of a kiss? Why do human beings love it so much? I suspect, somehow, there's a connection between it and this drawing-of-energy from the Source-dimension!

What about that magical remedy, known very well (and instinctively) by mothers everywhere, of kissing a hurt, to make it all right? Try it on yourself, next time you get hurt: purse your lips as tightly as possible, and put them right against the place that's hurting, and make a gentle suction. You'll get a sound, some kind of a "buzzing". You'll feel the vibration in your lips -- ranging from very subtle (with its corresponding, high-pitched sound) to much more coarse (with a lower pitch). You can even get sort of a "conversation" going, by changing the degree and the duration of individual suctions! Experiment with it, let the "melody" of it go wherever it likes....and, while you're doing it, thank the hurt place for being well again. In the case of most simple injuries, I've found that a very short bit of this (usually less than a minute) will remedy things perfectly! I've long had the feeling that it works because of something about the "conversation" of vibration and sound, between the lips and the other element; it's only now that I see this as another example of calling forth the innate healing-energy, Source-energy, from within the injured element itself!

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* Here's another site, Astral Dynamics, that may be worthwhile.

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