Archive for November, 2006

To Go Raw or Not To?

Friday, November 24th, 2006

I found this great website called Living Foods.  It’s a website about an all-raw diet.  By raw, I man nothing is cooked whatosever.  It only makes sense because heat obviously destroys food to some extent, taking out some of the nutrients.  But the fact that food becomes slightly toxic when cooked is another factor that I am really looking intro.  After eating a gigantic Thanksgiving feast, I felt awfully tired afterwards, which is something I really shouldn’t feel after eating a meal.  I should feel energized and ready to rumble.  But I didn’t.  I felt more tired than I did before I ate at all.  So maybe this is not the optimal ways of eating.  Maybe raw is the way to go.

Some o the articles on Living Foods (see link above) were very persuasive, and I’m curious to try something like this, but it will not be easy in the place I live now.  I may have to wait a couple of years or I could just do it now for a little while and see how I feel on it.  As long as I make the primary foods vegetables and fruits, along with nuts and seeds.   I’ve heard so many accolades about how it’s an amazing diet from many people, some of which who aren’t part of the whole health promoting field, so it may be worth a shot if I can stick with it.  I’ll have to try it or something.

The main thing that people supposedly derive from such a diet is increased mental clairty, more energy, and they lose weight at an amazing pace.  It’s definitely a good benefits package and it seems as if it is optimal, except I may have to eat some animal fat or something to get Vitamin B12 because a diet like this is completely devoid of any sort of vitamin.  It’s something I’ll have to consider.  I don’t want to have to take supplements or anything.  That’s not how I roll.  Supplements are for the people who are health nuts.  I just want to get all my vitamins naturally…

If anyone has experienced this diet and would wish to comment on it, then go ahead.  I’m not stopping you.  Just give me some insight as to what it means to go raw and how you cope with an unraw society.  So let me know…  Thank you.

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Why or Why Not

Thursday, November 23rd, 2006

I like to let my mind wander. Just let go of reality for awhile. It’s very comforting. What if I was different? What if I was older, younger, smarter, more energetic, less focused, what would my life be like if I was like that? Where would I go? Would I understand everything I do now? Or would I understand more? What if I was a woman who grew up in Singapore and was told her whole life that I wasn’t very important by my parents, or told I was useless? What would life be like if I were born to a millionaire and never had to work a day in my life? All of these insane thoughts, I kind of make different lives for myself that don’t have any real staying power in reality, but they at least allow me to pass the time. I need a reason for being here, though. There are no real reasons as through the perspective of the universe, everything becomes trivial. So it’s hard to really understand what’s going on. I’m not going to accept anything blindly either. I need to have it resonate with me. I need some sort of answer that is justified in my conscious mind. And until I have that, I really do not have any answers about reality in a way that I can comprehend. Sure, people have tried to explain reality as accurately as possible, but they have not done so to my standards. I need something more concrete, something I can grasp.

I want to know why we’ve created this world and why we live isolated from the rest of the universe, and mostly isolated from the world. I need answers, but it’s not easy to come by them these days. The fact that I’m thinking about this counts, though. If I was just living a sedentary life, with no real questions, no thoughts of introspection, then I would be ashamed of myself, realizing that I have nothing to offer. But maybe I’m crazy and the rest of the world is sane. How would I know? I have no one else to compare myself to that won’t be wearing their mask of sanity. The people that will act normal to fit in and never understand why until it’s too late, they are normal. It’s an assimilation, if you will. A direct assimilation that halts creativity and mind. But in order to be accepted by these people, these entities, we have to want the newest car, the greatest gadget, and watch hours of television where these innate values are fed to us with a silver spoon.

But what does this mean anyway? If someone is dishonest about marketing a product to you through all these relatively evil methods, what is their real motivation besides money? And what will money do for you once you have too much of it? And what does money have to do with the whole universe? Why are we on this planet where making money from something is more important than actively giving it away to benefit people? Maybe I was brought into existence too late because I’m sure the universe didn’t work this way thousands of years ago, a time where we thought for ourselves and based our decisions not by what others did, but from what we want to do.

I think the best question to ask in all of this is: Why? And I’m sure you could go for the cop-out answer: Why not? But that’s not very clever, nor is it amusing. People will go into some long-winded sermon about how a certain religion is right and that it’s the only way to answer that question. And I can’t deal with that. I don’t want beliefs forced on me. I want to figure my own beliefs out for myself. I’ll assess the situation and go from there. It’s a hell of a time doing this, though. It could take a lifetime, maybe longer. But most people don’t take the time to do this. They follow whatever they’re fed because it’s too much work to figure out things for themselves. Just go to someone who seems to be thriving in a current belief system and adopt it. But it shouldn’t be that simple. Something is telling me it has to resonate with you completely. It can’t be someone else’s words flowing through your head. The only thoughts that should be flowing through your head are yours.

I don’t know how much further I can take this before I go completely and utterly insane, but I feel there is such a group mentality in the world where people simply believe what certain people believe in order to be accepted, while not completely accepting themselves. If you completely and fully accept yourself, then there will be no need to search for acceptance in other people. This is where the concepts go astray because the majority of people don’t really accept themselves and don’t believe in anything specific, due to the fact they don’t take the time to see what works for them. So they take “the easy way out,” not finding beliefs and not accepting anything as real. So they look to others for some guidance, and the guidance most people give have to do with their own agendas and conversion rhetoric. It’s a terrible system and it needs to change. If I were to form a group, I wouldn’t want anyone to be here that doesn’t believe what I believe in because it would be incongruent with their beliefs. Why would you go to a Catholic church if you’re a Muslim?

But we all want answers. Answers are what we desire. Answer to Why and Why Not are very hard to come by. But most people don’t put in the time to answer logically. This is a problem because this leads most people to believing what others believe in just because they haven’t done the groundwork for their own unique belief system. We’re so conditioned to treat time as “money,” and to not take time to ponder these great questions, but rather to get as much done in a half-hour as is humanly possible. Efficiency is highly valued, but introspection and assessment of the self is not. We value robotic “good” workers much more than we reward intuitive thinkers whose ideas can be very useful. Sure, people like Jesus and Buddha got recognition and so did Socrates and Plato, but most of these people are told, “Why don’t you get a job, you lazy bastard!” And it’s wrong, wrong. Let them think, let them experiment.  These are the fathers of the new world.  Don’t stifle their creativity, but embrace it.

Sidenote:  I know these posts are becoming a bit more abstract and less funny, but it’s just I’ve been doing a lot of deep thinking lately and it’s been wonderful.  It’s an exercise in the mind.  You should try it sometime.  It does wonders for my creativity as well.  And the dreams!  Vivid, amazing dreams that you could never imagine unless you personally had them yourself!

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Oh My God!

Monday, November 20th, 2006

There’s always a question that people ask that quickly forms judgment on other people.  “Do you believe in God?”  As they ask this question, you aren’t really sure what kind of God they’re talking about, or if it can be anything.  Some people see God as this father figure, much like the governing force of nature, whille others simply see God as a presence in our world, an energy force.  So if anyone ever asks you a question like this, you should have them define what they’re talking about by “God.”  It’s almost like we’re handed this world and asked to make best judgments on what holds true for us.  For example, if you grew up Catholic and now you’re out in the world and you see all these other religions, of which yours damns them all the hell.  How can all these belief systems exist and all be the “one true religion?”

This is where it gets a little hazy.  With all the belief systems, most of which are fear-based or too structured to be realistic, are a trap if you really look at them.  Most of them have good messages, but they somewhat limit your scope of reality.  You can’t have certain experiences in certain belief systems, mostly because you don’t believe they’re possible.  But most people stay inside one religion or set of beliefs in their entire lifetime, never experiencing anything else, so even though they may believe that all the other religions are wrong, they have never experienced them from the inside and seen if they resonate with them at all.

Of course, most people never stray from the system in which they were born.  And it’s sad, really, because they never do any thinking about reality for themselves.  They allow others to do the thinking for them.  If you let someone else tell you what to do with your life, it wouldn’t really be your life anymore.  It would be the life of the person who’s telling you what to do.  So unless you make a decision that reflects yourself, you’re pretty much giving up control of your life.  I believe the whole test is to question your beliefs and wonder if there are any beliefs outside your own belief system that could work for you.  And it takes time to try each of them out, but it may be worth it in the end.  You never know.

But there are all these pressures in certain religions.  People will notice if you start to get away.  Like if you go to church every Sunday and have been doing so for the past ten years, then if you all of the sudden stop, there could be some backlash and people muttering, “That guy’s lost his mind.”  And the thought of dealing with this is one thing that holds us back.  Not only that, but the fact that you’ll probably be spiritually unstable for awhile because you have to adapt to any new belief in your world.  But that is only temporary.

I remember the time I tried to adopt a belief that time is only an illusion and is a creation of the mind.  At first, I couldn’t really grasp that, but eventually I came to figure out that everything is a creation of the mind.  Nothing just happens, there must be some sort of willing it to happen, be it a person, an animal, or a plant.  You see, the fact that time exists it mostly something we use to measure results, lifespan, and other seemlingly trivial things from the universe’s perspective.  If we place so much importance on the impermanent, then we start to place too much importance on the aspect of time.

The most mind-blowing realization I’ve ever come to is the fact that we really don’t matter that much.  The fact is, while looking at the universe and its expansive size, we are not exactly the best thing since sliced bread.  We are just as important as an insect or a planet.  We are a cell in the organism we call the universe.  We are here to perpetuate the existence of our planet, which for some reason exists.  People often ask why we’re here, and I say, you could look for the rest of your life and you may be able to figure out how we are here, the science of why we are here, but it doesn’t bring us anywhere close to the purpose for being here.

This is one thing I’ve been struggling with.  If we are as insignificant as it seems and our planet is nothing more than a small rock in the most gigantic formation of rocks anyone could ever imagine, then why is getting your taxes done so damn important?  How come people get stressed out over trivialities when there really is no need, from a cosmic perspective.  Even if you were to die, or even if the planet were to be destroyed, so what?  It’s not that big a deal.

And I think religion is the way to cope with all of this.  People place some sort of value on answers to these questions, and they’ll buy almost anything.  I’m not saying people who are religious are stupid, they’re not, if they’ve chosen their beliefs from examining many others.  If you ask this question to the universe, “Why are we here?” you most likely won’t get a response.  I think it’s because the universe is asking the same question to you:  “Why are YOU here?”

And answering that question is very difficult to do.  Many people never answer it in their entire lifetimes.  I mean, if you have realized what I have, you know that from a cosmic perspective, choosing a purpose for your life can be very difficult.  Now that you realize the magnitude of the situation.  If you want to be a lawyer, but you know that doing so will force you to lie a lot, then you have to make a choice of whether or not you want to pay that price.  I’m not sure how the universe works, but from what I’ve seen, people usually get what they deserve, but it’s almost meaningless if you keep shifting perspectives, even to the other side of the globe.

So I think the best deal is to choose a belief system that gives you the most power.  Choose one that will allow you to feel the most in control of your life.  You can give up control, but you can never give up responsibility.  If you have control, you do have responsibility, but if you don’t have control, you still have the rsponsibility to regain control.  So gain control of your beliefs and don’t follow something just because the rest of your family does or the church you go to does.  Don’t expect them to be understanding of your change in beliefs, as they most likely will dismiss you as insane.

I guess it’s all about you, but not you in the selfish way.  It’s you as a collective whole, you as a planet, you as a universe to make it a better place without restrictions.  You shouln’t have to ask a pie-in-the-sky authority figure if you can do certain things.  Do what feels right and do what will give you the most power, but not power in an evil way, but power for the highest possible good you can imagine.

Then the most empowering for me is called subjective reality where a) there is only one consciousness, b) you are that consciousness, and c) everything is created by thoughts in that consciousness. It gives you an insane amount of power, but also an insane amount of responsibility.  So therefore, it places the world, the universe, in your hands.  It definitely takes time to get used to this, as your realize that other people are actually a projection of yourself.  Even strangers that pass by and plants, animals, books, tables, chairs, they’re all part of you and you have the power to change it.  It’s a very harmonious way of living, but you have to work at the thought part because every negative thought you have will be created, just as the psitive ones will.  So there are a lot of goods and bads like any other religion, but it is the only belief system that empowers you to this extent.  I hope I’ve been helpful in my musings and have a nice day, at least the one I created for you.

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Job Titles and Message: Edited

Saturday, November 18th, 2006

I just read an article called The Medium vs. The Message on Steve Pavlina’s site. It explained how some people define themselves through a job title or as a blogger, which is empty in itself as defining yourself as a medium and not by your message is very limiting because you don’t really show the value you provide by doing this. If you say, “I’m a lawyer,” you’re not really giving a concrete example of who you are. You’re more saying the medium in which you work. And this is something that can give a false representation of who you are and what you do, and will be an empty shell because a medium in general is empty without a message to fill it. I wake up much earlier than I used to. I’ve heard so much how waking up early is so good for you, so I decided to make it a habit. Eight o’clock right now is the time I wake up. However, waking earlier than that may inhibit my sleep time at night, so for now I’m going to stick with eight o’clock or if I wake up earlier, then. It wasn’t that hard to do this, either. I just set an alarm away from my bed, so it forces me to get up and go over to turn it off. I use a cell phone alarm, so I never really know what time it is, so if I wake up, I get up, oblivious to the time. As long as it’s not dark outside, I’m okay. I can usually fight off a cold or any other sickness now because I’ve become more immune due to my new habits, but right now I am a little sick. It’s the first time in maybe eight or nine months this has happened, so it’s just a freak accident, I think. But I’ve been pretty healthy in that regard and I have to credit it not just to my diet, but my mental state of being. I have been at peace and have been relaxed for a long time now and it’s really helped my creativity in a large way. I’ve totally gotten rid of the “rat race” mentality and focused primarily on doing what comes natural to me. So far so good… What does this mean about the message vs. the medium? i feel that what I do has to do with different aspects of my life. If you limit yourself to defining yourself from one aspect of your life (i.e. your job), then you neglect other parts of your life, I guess I’ll say. But all these businesspeople say you should pick a focused niche when doing your career… That’s only true in a profession where everyone is a carbon copy of everyone else and there’s so much normality it would make me vomit. You are unique, so you should bring your unique capablilities and personality to everything you do. Have a nice day. So as I use the blogging medium to express myself and show that if you limit yourself to just one medium or define yourself by that medium, then you’re not really telling the whole story. If someone comes up to you and says, “I’m a teacher,” does that really explain their entire existence? Does it give you any insight into the kind of person they are? It may give some sort of insight, but it will not allow you to really know what these people live for. Another thing is that using the medium to define yourself limits you from realizing how to use your message in other ways. If you’re constantly reinforcing the lawyer medium and you get a chance to do something else that’s not related to lawyering, and it would most likely be a good experience, then you may not choose to do it because it’s not in harmony with your job title. This is why I find that when people ask me what I do for a living, I simply say, “I stinulate minds and try to make people think, while at the same time laugh.” I’ve been into personal growth for awhile, ever since I had a brain tumor. That was the first spark of growth that started this thing. Then I grew a beard, and now I’m starting to grow internally. And it’s a pretty rapid pace. But I enjoy it to some extent. The place in which I feel it’s really made a difference is in my clarity of thinking and being able to write for hours without being bored. I don’t succumb to the usual mental distractions that plague all of us at one time or another. It’s a great feeling so far. But it’s more than that. I’m starting to make quantum leaps forward in many areas. I’ve drastically improved my diet and eat a variety of fruits and vegetables I would have never tried before. I’m hooked on kiwis. I also have been eating smarter, meaning less in calories, but more in nutrients. I’ve even looked into an all-raw diet in the near future if I ever want to try it.

 Edit:  it seems like every time I put a link on any blog post, it erases half of my post, so the rest of it was mysteriously lost in the ether.  The basic message was that there is no job title for your life.  You are a unique person and you bring a unique quality to everything you do, so don’t limit yourself by calling yourself by your job title, but by the kind of person you are.  Now, if I could only figure out how to stop this inherent depletion of data from continuing.  I’ll most likely have to start typing these in a Microsoft Works Document, which is actually just as risky.  But at least I’ll have a dual copy of it.

So the main message is to be yourself and don’t let labels define yourself.  No label can be put on the vast experiences you’ve had that are not like anyone else’s.  If you can remember that, I’ve done my job.  If you can’t, you may want to look into memory improvement techniques…

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Fear Kills the Mind

Friday, November 17th, 2006

Here’s something I’ve just come to realize. Human beings are the only species that kills their own species for no reason and rejoices in the fact that they killed them. It is almost like our whole society based on war and ownership of land has completely turned us into worse than all animals. Some animals kill other animals for food. And that’s part of nature, but we kill our own species for power, lust, greed, and a sense of security. We kill for no reason whatsoever. We have no intention of preserving life. The people in power are mentally ill, schizophrenic to an extent. They’ll find a way to get the nation in support of war, even if civilian casualties occur in the remote country we’re off to bomb mercilessly. It’s almost as if we don’t care anymore. We don’t care about anyone but ourselves. News from other countries pales in comparison to what the latest celebrity is wearing. They use all this media of celebrities and fear-based news to keep us complacent. Fear is the killer of the mind. And they all know that. If they keep us in fear, they know they can gain power over us. And if they increase this level of fear over time, they could have us all going to war to kill people who most likely are no threat to us. But the fact that they have us all rooted up in fear is what makes it possible for us to make this move. They fill our heads with propaganda and bad news about other countries to somehow justify their eventual warfare on that nation. And you never see the other side. It’s always about what they want you to see and hear.

People follow along with this, too. They believe everything they hear and they will do exactly what five or six people in power want them to do. All the negative things in the world are created through some sort of fabrication of paranoia, which leads to us feeling like we’re in danger, when realistically we are nowhere near being in danger. I just wish more people would come onto this way of thinking because it’s getting to be insane. I can even see our government fabricating terrorist attacks on our nation in the near future. I’m not sure if anything of the like has happened yet, but I’m sure it might have, and it is a definite tactic for the future, no matter what the cost. It’s not about the people. It’s about the retention of power. But these people will only remain in power as long as we eat the things we are fed. We’re not sold lies, we buy the lies they give to us. And we not only believe them, we act on them, not knowing that what we are acting on has no real value.

So I guess it’s pretty prevalent why I do not associate myself with the rules of society or the fear-based ways of thinking. I just can’t bring myself down to that level again after experiencing nothing with fear. If you can transcend fear, then you’ve really taken away their power. But people are creating new things to be afraid of every day. Why would a country create biological and chemical warfare? To keep other countries in fear. Why else? “Don’t mess with us because if you do, we’ll kill all of you.” That’s the mindset of these countries. I find it so excruciatingly painful that army soldiers and generals can go to war, kill five thousand people, and not stand trial for their murders. Yet, if someone accidentally kills someone in a car wreck or something, they could face up to twenty-five years in jail. It’s just not logical. A serial killer pales in comparison to someone who goes into a country with the sheer purpose of taking it over, by killing thousands of people and even displaying them up on a stage as they behead them. It’s all relative, really. We’re all going to die sooner or later, so I don’t know why we allow this fear-based thinking or non-thinking to rule our lives. If we accept the fact that the world is a dangerous and fearful place, then it will be one in our minds. And we will filter out all the good we see and concentrate solely on the bad, which will reinforce our feelings of a terrible world. And the cycle continues to grow stronger. The world makes sure only the people who are of this evil and dark intention will ever make it into power. And when someone who doesn’t follow this is put into power, like John F. Kennedy, we find a way to assassinate him. And you see how terrible the world seems, but in reality, the only way it seems that way is because we are all conditioned to think that way. So if we drop the propaganda this world has been feeding us, then maybe we’ll be able to overcome this security conundrum.

And the fear is toxic. Look at all the diseases there must be right now. All these people with anxiety and stress-related conditions that totally run their lives. It’s a great market for the drug industry, I’m sure. “Let’s see how much money we can make from all these new conditions we created.” It’s a damn shame, but it’s the truth. I’m sure it’s much worse now. Poverty-stricken people in the streets begging for change or food and there’s the fat cat aristocrat who won’t spare even a dollar to the hungry or the food retention challenged, or whatever bogus word the government will come up with to euphemize starving.

This are just some instantaneous thought I had after watching the 2012 thing, which was over 3 1/2 hours long.  I fell asleep 2:30 through it, so I missed the last hour, but it was pretty good.  Here’s the link:  Click here.  I just hope you have four hours to spare…intersting stuff, though.

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