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 1 Oct 2004 @ 15:38, by ming. Personal Development
Via Vicky, a quote from Beth Johnson:When things seem out of control remember that, indeed, they are. It is only the belief that you are ever in control that makes life seem to go awry. The harder you try to rule life, the harder it fights back. Learn to tell the difference between creating in the present and trying to control the future. One feels good, the other bad. It is quite telling that the people who try the hardest, or even who succeed the most in being in control, are people with personality disorders. Obsessive-compulsive neat-freaks and tyrants and dictators. Seems illogical and even counter-intuitive for us humans. Seems at first glance like it should be a great virtue to be in control of oneself and one's environment.
I suppose it still is, in a sense, but it is important to understand which kind of control is impossible, and which tends to drive us crazy. The quote points it out, for that matter. The time to create is in the present. The only thing you really have control over is what you do right now. And, sure, the better you can be aware of what exactly you're doing here in the present, and why you're doing it, and what you're trying to do, the better you'll probably do.
But you have no real control over what happens in the future. If you do things well in the present you have a whole lot of say as to what directions things go in. But you don't control what actually happens in the future. You might control what direction you're pointed in in the present, but you don't control what exactly happens, and you don't have direct control over where you end up.
You don't control the past either. A lot of our baggage relates to that we're trying to wish the past into being something different than what it was. Our regrets and failures. The things we should have done differently. The actions or results we feel ashamed of. You can't really change any of it. But you CAN change what you feel about it now, what you will learn from the past, and what you actually do right now, and how you create what you want now.
You don't control other people. You can influence them, inspire them, help them, guide them, threaten them, whatever. But if you think you actually directly can control them and their thoughts and emotions and actions, then you're probably a bit psycho. What they actually feel like doing is outside your realm of control.
It is one of those paradoxical things. You of course CAN influence others, and make things happen that you'd like to happen. But the catch is that you can only do that by what you do right here in the present moment. You can be knowledgable and perceptive and do the very best you can. And the better you are at it, the more likely it is that you'll create something like what you had in mind. But you're not in control of it.
And, yes, it feels good to do what we know how to do, what we like to do, what we feel is right right now. And all the other things we try to control typically feel bad. They're the causes of stress. Trying to make sure a certain outcome is guaranteed. Worrying about what other people will think and do. Worrying about what we might have done wrong, or what we might have forgotten about in the past. Worrying about what we might have failed to predict, or what we're failing to predict right now. We might feel it is necessary, but generally those things feel bad and stressful.
What makes it all harder is that our society seems to be structured so as to demand of us to be in control of both our past and future. We will be blamed for the things we do wrong, and for our failure to predict and control what happened. Our lives are full of commitments and accountabilities we can't easily opt out of. You need to pay the rent next month, of course. Your kids need to go to school, of course. You need to have done your taxes right, of course. You needed to have had the right permission to remodel your house. If you do the wrong thing, or say the wrong thing, or don't say the right thing, other people might be very upset with you. There are many things that could ruin your career or your reputation if you do them, or don't do them, or you hide them, or you don't hide them. Most of those things aren't here right now, and don't really have much to do with what you're inspired to be doing right now. But any of them can pop up and bite you at any time, and if you screw them up, everybody can easily agree on what a big idiot you are. So it seems like you have to always try to control all of these factors. Most of which you don't really control.
If we were just living from day to day on a south sea island without an economy, picking fruit off the trees when we were hungry, sleeping when we were sleepy, it would seem much easier. Nothing much to worry about, other than what is here right now. But that isn't how most of of live now. And even if you packed up and moved to Tonga, it probably wouldn't work like that today.
So, is it practical, or is it just a cool self-help thing to tell people to make them not be so stressed?
Well, it is first of all an awareness, I think. Know the difference between what you control and what you don't control. As to the stuff you DO control, try to do it as masterfully and deliberately as you can. Don't wait for somebody else to come and do your part. And for the part which you don't control, relax and be prepared for any outcome. Don't be attached to any one particular outcome. Doesn't mean you can't have preferences, and do certain things to make the more desirable things happen. Just means, do your part, but then let go, and don't be attached to outcomes. Know when your part stops, and it is up to the universe and to other people and to luck to make things happen from there on.
Isn't just a motivational thing to day. I'd say it reveals a key principle in how the universe works. And it provides one of the keys to happiness and success. And it also reveals another of our mental fallacies. I.e. ways we use our abstract thinking faculties to screw ourselves up, because we don't understand them well, and we confuse our thoughts about things with the things themselves. More >
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 1 Oct 2004 @ 13:28, by scotty. Environment, Ecology
What surrounds you?
Did you ever walk into a public washroom that smelt so bad you wanted to choke?
But you were so desperate to go to the bathroom you had to carry on.
Did you notice something? By the time you left five minutes later, it didn't smell quite so bad!
And what if you had accidentally locked yourself in there for an hour? You might be saying, "What smell?"
There's a principle operating here. More >
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 30 Sep 2004 @ 23:59, by ming. Spirituality
Paul Hughes talks about the potentials of the dream world:I have come to believe that dreams are actually quite real, more real the so-called “waking life” and that this waking life is simply part of what we must make authentic via this dream world. I can’t speak for others, but I am now quite certain (as certain as I can be about anything) that my dream life is trying desperately to become manifest here in the real world. This might sound too new agey for some people, but it all makes perfect sense to me. When things go right in my life, they have this unmistakable resonance with my dream life – the feelings, sensations, gestalts and so on. In my dream life all the answers are there, the solutions to our problems, to world peace, to sustainable society, to genuine happiness for everyone. It seems so obvious, so simple in my dream life, and yet so complicated here. I feel the same way. The best decisions I've made, the most beneficial and surprising turns of my life have all come out of or been connected with my dreamworld. And there's something there, under the surface, bubbling up where it can, which, however undescribable it is, seems to offer the answers we need to make the world work better for us. I easily forget, and I often don't listen, but my experience does tell me that it usually is more effective to sleep and dream and see what surfaces than it is to think of a solution with mental willpower alone.
I don't really understand how it works, but that is probably part of the magic, and part of the problem. That I think I have to understand. We so easily dillude ourselves as to our waking mental faculties. But yet they're so incomplete and faulty, and we don't have all the necessary information, so we're often incapable of making good decisions. And that might be because we try to do it with just the visible 10% of the iceberg. The rest, the more important parts, are under the surface.
It seems like the bigger mind we hook into in dream states works on more channels. It has more dimensions, more connections. More degrees of freedom than our more rigid conscious minds that only can juggle a handful of concepts at the same time, and not very well at that.
But yet there's quite a veil between the different parts of ourselves. So much that most of us don't really remember what happens in that other section of our lives, and when we do it is just a jumbled mess which fades quickly. Which easily can be dismissed as just misfiring neurons and recooked hallucinations of yesterday. Where really it could be infinitely more.
What would happen if the veil lifted significantly more? What if we could be as multi-dimensionally hooked up all the time? What if we accepted the dreamworld more as a legitimate sphere to navigate our lives through?
I don't know, but let me sleep on it. More >
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 29 Sep 2004 @ 19:28, by ming. Counseling, Psychology
That isn't really a very hard question, but it gets hard if one sort of starts in the wrong place.
If you start off by assuming the universe and the life in it is just some random and meaningless occurrance, then it is a fairly meaningless question too. It just becomes something to say about people you really don't like. Or if your starting point is a story about God and the Devil, then it becomes a really convoluted thing to try to explain.
I start with the observation and assumption that everybody and everything fundamentally is good. Not particularly "good" in a good versus evil sense. Not a polarized idea. Rather, everything is inherently tending towards being and doing something that has a constructive angle to it. It is good for something in the bigger or smaller picture. Or at least it is neutral.
A rock is a certain piece of something that has certain properties. It doesn't do a whole lot, but it can be a piece of a mountain, or a wall, or many other useful things. If a rock once in a while falls on somebody's head and hurts them, it isn't because the rock is evil and was trying to do some damage. It is rather passively just being a rock, and obeying the law of gravity and things like that. Obviously.
A tree is an alive entity that does a whole lot more, and actively extracts stuff from the environment, grows certain structures, and reproduces, etc. It has a certain natural cycle of how it does things. If one day a dead branch falls off a tree and kills somebody, it isn't because the tree is evil and meant to do that to be mean. Dead branches fall off eventually, and it was just time, and the wind helped a bit and then a bird sat on it. None of which was meant to harm anybody.
How about animals, then. They spend a good deal of their time going around killing other living entities. At least they eat plants, killing them in the process. Or they hunt down other animals, kill them and eat them? Is that evil? Well, we might not like it when we look at it, but the animals appear to have no ill will about it. That is just what they do, and they need to eat. Even the animals eaten don't seem to be as stressed about it as we humans might be when contemplating it. A fish eats another fish. They second fish would instinctively get away if it could, but if it gets eaten there doesn't seem to be much involved that we'll recognize as emotion or suffering. Nothing evil anywhere. Even if they sometimes do it for sport. Our cat will happily keep a wounded lizard alive for as long as possible, while lazily dashing it around. Or bring a half-dead bird into the house and drag it around. Is it evil? Well, we sure don't like it, but no amount of yelling about it seems to make any difference. It will happily do it again. Because it serves a function. A cat in the wild would of course need to practice its hunting skills in order to get food and survive. Nothing personal about it. It is not that it doesn't like birds or anything.
So, now, us humans are a little more complicated. We think abstractly and have feelings about complicated things. But most of the time we also just go about our business. We learn how to do things, find a spot to do it in, we eat, reproduce, entertain ourselves, form social groups, build tools, etc.
Everybody's inherently just trying to live and do what seems to be there to do. When provided with a choice, we'll generally choose the better one according to our aggregated instincts for what we're trying to do and what works. Life is trying to survive well and do better. It would be fair to assume that such a fundamntal aim is built into all life-forms. Certainly we can observe it in anything that lives.
But we humans are more vulnerable to bad information. In part because we do many things abstractly, apparently as opposed to many other players in nature. And, related to that, that our activities get very complicated. It is no longer just to eat the first thing that comes along that looks edible whenever we're hungry. The choices concerning maintaining and improving our lives are increasingly made with abstract information, and with the real stuff being quite removed from us. And we're tied into abstract social systems that might be beyond us individually to understand.
So, if I'm a soldier trained to kill people, and I do so, is that evil? Not necessarily. I might have the information that I'm doing so in order to protect the large social group that I consider myself belonging to. I might have been brought up and educated and trained to look at it a certain way, and I simply do what I consider my duty, and what seems logical. Not necessarily anything personal against the people I kill. I'm acting according to the information I have, the training I've been given, and the circumstances I'm in.
If I were a German soldier controlled by the Nazis, does that suddenly make it different? Not really. I'm still a victim of the information I have and what I've been trained into, and I might have limited choices available to make it all different.
What if I'm a burglar or bank robber, stealing with a gun in my hand, to fund my crack habit. Evil? Maybe just the only solution I saw available to me. Again, doesn't make it right or permissible in society, but for the individual it might still be a matter of doing the best I can with my limited options, and possibly false information and misguided beliefs.
Am I saying that there's no evil, and everybody's just acting within the information they have? Not quite. That's what's going on most of the time. But there's still something we could call "evil". Which is relatively rare.
You know, when one looks at what is going on in the world, and one doesn't get around to seeing it in such an "understanding" fashion as I attempt here, one might well reach some different conclusions. There are bad people in the world, and they seem to get away with it. Being bad works. It is much easier and more productive to think about just yourself, and not care about anybody else.
It is a misunderstanding, really. Again, based on faulty information, an individual looks around him and concludes that other people are evil and therefore they have the upper hand. And insted of continuing to be the victim of them, he flips around and instead assumes what he believes is their kind of personality. Bad. Evil. Thinking just about yourself, and not caring who gets hurt when they get in your way.
It is not about certain types of actions that are inherently evil. Those depend on the context. What is key here is the intention. Somebody who actually intends to do harm and it doesn't bother them.
It is a fake personality. Nobody really were like that originally. There are no evil babies. But a sufficient amount of torture and abuse from an early age from one's parents or from authorities or from what one perceives as "the system" can do it to the best of people. Or one might simply take a "logical" overview of the world and mistakenly conclude that being evil is the way to go.
One might do all that unconsciously, without thinking it through, simply changing one's personality to survive. Or, more chillingly, one might consciously conclude that it will work and one will get ahead over others by being that way.
Very few people have adopted what we could call an "evil" personality. Maybe a couple of percent of us. But that can create a lot of havoc. And any of us might in some moments, for reasons we might not completely understand ourselves, instinctively choose to be evil, and to act with the sole intention to hurt others, maybe to bring oneself ahead.
Either way, it is a copy of what we think others are doing. Which they probably weren't really doing for the reasons we think. The parent who was mean to you when you were little might have had their own story of being a victim of the circumstances and of bad information. They might think the Bible told them to beat you, to make you a better person. Or they were repeating what their parents did to them. Or they were lost and stuck and unaware.
But one way or another, some people end up acting as if they're evil, and they will deliberately hurt other people and enjoy it. Psychopaths. That only happens when they're already pretty bad off, when they've closed their hearts, when they never developed any empathy for others, and when they're loaded with false information about how life works. But there's plenty of that around, and no general education that teaches you how to be social.
So, what to do about that? Well, with the majority of people, who're mostly trying to do what they think is good, reason and kindness and good information will work. If they do something that hurts others, one can make them understand that, and they would naturally feel bad about it and try to do it better. But with the smaller number of people who're stuck in the evil personality, it is quite different. Being nice to them is not going to help, and will only show them how weak you are; and showing them how their actions hurt others is only going to encourage them. Because they aren't really there, but they have adopted a strategy quite opposite to yours or mine, and they've invested a lot in cementing it into place.
Anybody might change. One might wake up and realize what one is doing, and change one's ways. But with this kind of thing, it doesn't happen easily or casually. It does happen, though.
But in the meantime it would be valuable to develop a keen ability to notice who's who. If the person in front of you is still connected with their basic goodness, then you can talk with them, give them information, tell them truth, share how you feel, and you might get along better, and they'll use what they learn to make better decisions afterwards, more beneficial decisions. If the person in front of you is one of the very few who have lost touch with who they really are, and adopted an evil personality, then it is all different. They'd use everything they learn about you to gain an upper hand over you and get you out of the way.
Now, many people have bad inter-personal skills and foggy perceptions and lots of emotional baggage and might easily conclude that what I described fits perfectly on their ex-wife or their boss. So let me say again that the odds are that it isn't so. Most likely any differences could be sorted out if the emotional baggage gets out of the way, and it becomes evident that all parties really would like things to work.
It is a bit dangerous to even have labels like that, as people who can't figure out how to understand each other and get along are likely to hide behind horrible labels they apply to each other. You know, if you have a different belief system than I, and you do things I don't like, you're just evil. No, it is not that I'm talking about.
No, we're more talking about serial killers and otherwise criminally insane psychopaths. Oh, and some of the people who are gang members, muggers, terrorists, etc. But far from all. And indeed there would be people in the group that wouldn't be very obvious at all. Well-educated CEOs of companies, government officials, people who on the surface appear to have great people skills, be charming and eloquent, have families, etc. But underneath, their modus operendi is to sabotage and disable everybody else, preferably in the hidden, so that they can get their own way and the others don't. Everything looks right on the outside, to the casual observer, but inside we have the walking dead, and they leave a trail of destruction in their wake, which they well might succeed to make appear as somebody else's fault. Hard to pinpoint, but very important, to spot the psychopaths that don't look the part. And not to pick them as your leaders.
As some point we might with some luck have a society that makes it easier for us to connect with our basic humanity, and which no longer rewards psychopathic behavior. Until then it is just very necessary to pay close attention to what people's basic motivations really are.
Another angle on it is that despite our individually fairly noble intentions, we might very well accidentally create organizations that possess similar characteristics as that of a psychotic individual. It is not very hard for a large corporation to be evil, and to act in its own interest to the detriment of anybody who gets in the way. For that matter, it is inherent in its design. Only if some of the people running it go way out of their way to make it act more decently and socially can it be otherwise. More >
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 29 Sep 2004 @ 14:55, by scotty. Investigation, Intelligence
Would You buy a house if you were only allowed to see one of its rooms?
Would you by a car if you were allowed to see only its tires and a taillight?
Would you pass judgement on a book after reading only one paragraph?
No - neither would I.
Good judgement means having a broad picture.
Not only does that go for buying houses cars and books it’s even more true in evaluating life.... or people !
One failure doesn’t make a person a failure - one achievement doesn’tmake a person a success either !
. More >
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 28 Sep 2004 @ 23:59, by ming. Violence, War
Not that I'll make a habit of it, but it is not the kind of thing the media tend to cover much, so somebody might have missed it. A chilling way of getting a sense of some of the routine activities of the U.S. military forces in Iraq is to watch some of the leaked videos taken from helicopters while they essentially fly around and murder fairly random and sometimes unarmed people who happened to be walking in the wrong place. The latest from Falluja. Video. The audio is the most chilling part. The pilot reports that a large number of people are walking on the street and asks over the radio if he should "take them out". And the instant answer is "yes". Not armed people, mind you, just people. A rocket makes an end to them, whoever they actually were, and he exclaims "aw, dude!".
And an older one from January which actually appeared once on ABC. An Apache takes out three people, which to me look like farm workers walking around between a tractor and a truck. I'm of course not trained in quickly determining what some grey shadows seen through a night vision camera really are doing. I'm not sure the people in the helicopter are either. I do understand some things about body language, though, and it is obvious that the people on the ground didn't seem to think they had anything to hide from before the helicopter started shooting at them. And blowing away wounded people who're trying to crawl to safety certainly isn't according to the Geneva convention, if any of the rest of it is.
It shows the horror war easily becomes, particularly when one side is hovering in the air with high tech weaponry, but only a fuzzy b&w image on the screen, and the other side is unknown. It easily becomes to just kill anything that moves that looks a little suspicious, anything that possibly, potentially, maybe could be somebody who might have hostile intent. Because they maybe live in the general area where somebody else blew up somebody from your side the day before. But a lot of the time they're just farmers mounting their plough or parents taking their kids to school. War is never going to make sense. More >
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 26 Sep 2004 @ 04:50, by nemue. Shared Purpose
….to be treated and to expect to be treated any differently? Is our fate just that, our fate and what we need is acceptance of the eventual outcome?
I was reading a recent article by Richard Heinberg in New Dawn Magazine where Richard was expressing his views on Oil, War and the Decline of America. The wake up call for us is the depletion in fossil fuels and what that means for our future and the future of our children. More >
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26 Sep 2004 @ 00:07, by skookum. Ideas, Creativity
Gather ye Nuts While ye May
By Marissa A Spencer
In the crisp autumn morning you can hear the soft crinkling of falling leaves and the occasional thud of ripened acorns. During my daily walk amongst the trees my path brought me before a harried squirrel. More >
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 25 Sep 2004 @ 21:35, by mre. Environment, Ecology
We are making good progress on the programming for the Jewish / Muslim email dialogue.
For the best writeup yet of the Voice of Humanity vision, see the earlier article entitled "A New Heaven".
The New Visions for Culture and Society Committee of the Threshold Foundation has offered a $50,000 grant "to proactively address societal awareness of mass extinction and our responsibility in creating and reversing it." The current mass extinction is very serious, with projections of loss of 50 percent of all species by 2100 at the current rate. I have applied for the grant with the following LOI (Letter of Inquiry): More >
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25 Sep 2004 @ 15:51, by gsosbee. Legal, Justice
I brought suit against the fbi to stop them from the painful and horrendous assaults employed against me in their efforts to silence me from reporting their crimes. The following excerpt from the court's decision in my case states the law of the land as currently upheld by the United States Supreme Court (which refused my simple request for a preliminary injunction to stop the assassins of the fbi from a continuation of their hideous campaign which continues to date uninterrupted for almost seven years); the ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals , ninth Circuit , stands at once as a disgraceful monument to United States government corruption and as a pronouncement of things to come to the people of all the world under the NWO ; the decision seen below (and also reproduced in its entirety at www.sosbeevfbi.com ) is dated 7-23-01 and is affirmed by the highest court in the land on 10-1-01 (see 534US894):
" The district court did not err in dismissing Sosbee's claims against the United States Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the individual defendants in their official capacities because agencies of the United States and federal agents in their official capacities are immune from suit for constitutional violations."
Sosbee writes:
The population of the earth must be told that the torturers/terrorists of the fbi/cia are now reaching into their homes, work, and play with the same outrageous and unacceptable authority/intention as that implied above and that, unless stopped now, great suffering of astounding proportions will ensue for generations to come at the direction of the fbi/cia and their operatives.
_________________________________________________________
Note: the latest country to submit (under the auspices of the global terror threat) to fbi oppressive rule and to the law of nwo as set forth in www.sosbeevfbi.com is Australia; human rights watchers must be more vigilant there.
news:FBI to establish base in Sydney
ABC News via Yahoo! Australia & NZ News - Sep 21 10:15 PM
The New South Wales Government says the placing of an FBI officer in Sydney will be a major step forward in improving the flow of global intelligence to the state.
-------- ----------- ---------------
See Also:
Torture Warrants and Law: Justifying Torture and
Making it Legal?
Rosemary Horton, P.L. Duffy Resource Centre,
Trinity College, Western Australia
[link]
See also:
[link]
__________________________________________
For more information regarding the NWO implications of fbi/cia global criminal enterprizes, see my article dated September 19, 2004, entitled:
Nations lose their character and soul to fbi/cia murderous tyrants
----------------------------------
See:
[link]
________________________________________________________
For more on the police state from a credible source, see the article dated and titled as follows:
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Message From A Desert Storm Paratrooper
at:
[link]
----------------------------------------------------------
A method for fbi to seize assets at will:
[link]
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