My e-painting called The Basin

Constant Dedication

The longer I live, the more often I keep dedicating this poem that I wrote back in my Sophomore year in High School to someone else. Warning: you may have to think a little to get the meaning ("perspective") right!

Short People

A short person is

A person who

You look down at

To look up to!

Choice "Circles"

Why do we blame “GOD” for our choices?

From the beginning, there was choice. There will always be choice. Choices affect outcomes in life. Simple law. So why do we keep blaming someone or something else for choices made?

In the beginning, from the bible standpoint, choices only affected two people – Adam and Eve. Choose knowledge and the soul consciousness of “good” and “evil”, or remain in simple existence like the creatures of the forest

As more births came and populations grew, choices affected more and more people. As people became towns, cities, countries, and nations through time, each choice intertwined more and more the consequences of our choices with those around us.

The world is made up of “choice circles”.

Choice circles are what rule our lives. A choice circle is like the ripple in a pond created by the cast of a stone. That cast stone is your action, and the pond is life.

So... Whatever God you pray to – DO NOT SET BLAME ON YOUR GOD for the choices made by mankind.

This world is a “world of worlds” – defined and perceived by every individual. Each world is in the mind of each of us. Our perceptions and our own personal values determine how we behave and interact with others.

Where institutionalized religions guide our values, we, each, set those values on a personal basis. Choices based on those values ingrained within each of us is what drives each of us to our actions. These choices are our own to make.

You cannot blame your God for the choices that you make. Through all the religions, myths, and legends of time, choice is left to mankind to make. Gods do not choose our actions for us. We are left to our choices and they determine our actions and the consequences for them.

And with more choices come more ripples in the pond of life. Watch how the ripples in a pond circle out and bump into each other's waves. How they distort each other into a new wave from different ripples, traveling in a new direction caused by the different ripples. This is the same way different ripples from different choices create new ripples that distort from original intentions. This is the interaction of “choice circles” - new ripples created from more than one choice, often known as an “accident”.

Take the following scenario:

Your child is late for an event. You drive faster than the speed limit to get them on time to the event. Another parent doesn't supervise their youngster on a tricycle in the front yard. The child rides, suddenly, into the street. You don't have enough time to avoid hitting the child...
A poor little child's life is extinguished or irreparably damaged.

Two seemingly harmless poor choices? One terrible life changing incident for an innocent child.
This is a simple scenario of choices creating a new ripple. Multiply this scenario with smaller choices by a few or ten or a hundred. How many ripples can be created from the small bad choices of tens or thousands of bad choices?

Your everyday choice matters! You think it doesn't but it does! Choose to do what is safe, rather than what is expedient or convenient. Choose to do what is right, rather than wrong. No matter how small the decision. All choices affect the ripples around you and your loved ones. All choices affect everyone by the ripples they create and the ripples that they collide with. Look around you and consider every “accident” that was a result of many tiny bad choices that added up.

Do not ignore a bad choice simply because it seems to be of no great importance. Place importance on making valuable choices, not receiving value from them. Then you will truly find the value in making good choices. When you have time to avoid accidents that may have occurred due to a small poor choice someone else made. Think of the possibilities. Think of the difference each of us can make by realizing the consequences of choice circles colliding.

Your choice is not alone. Every choice makes a difference.

Concrete Dreams

This post came about when our program started undergoing some changes and the dollar-per-day program title was about to be changed or dropped. Here was my response to a particular comment:

RE: “Let's change the advertisement amount to something a little less optimistic.”

What???

Let's change (rethink) that wording... Optimism is part of patience and persistence. Hope is why we came here and why we stay. (h)op(e)timism is essential to bettering our conditions. It is also what we are really "selling".

What would you say instead of "less optimistic"? Reality is what you make it when the reality you perceive isn't what you really want it to be and are willing to struggle to change. Something more "realistic"? This is probably the first rethink that comes to mind. But doesn't that attack hope and say "accept a lesser reality than what you really want"?

NEVER lessen your Hopetimism! Rather, establish a shorter term goal. During the pursuit of your dreams, you often have to adjust your temporary, or short term, goals according to the milestones that you reach. Your ultimate goal should not change - Just the milestones that you reach along the way.

Okay, so this may sound idealistic and flowery to you. BUT, that is the part of your psyche, or soul, that drives you to make the change that you set out to make. Never cover that spark. Remind yourself, and your colleagues, every chance that you can, that that spark is what drives your will forward. Don't you already do that for your friends and family? (I hope so.)

Of course, being human, we all get down or frustrated. That is temporary. Each day is temporary. There is no such thing as "I'm depressed tomorrow" or "I'm frustrated tomorrow" as long as hopetimism drives you to persist. The hope that tomorrow will be better than today is what brought us here and what we are looking for in the people that we sign up. (Sometimes that hope is simply "let tomorrow be as good as today is".) Remember the old adage "Hope Is Eternal"?

So...

If you don't choose that milestone, then choose another. What milestone do you want to promote? An extra $200 a month? Some would be happy with that. An extra $1000 a month? Some would be happy with that. The audience that you target is the audience that you will get. If you feel that $200 a day is too much, then choose a different amount and, hopefully, your audience will change that ultimate goal into just a milestone later. Goals are things and things can and do often change.

Should we change that amount? Or just point them to the chart and say "Choose your own goal"? Maybe that's what we should do. The whole idea behind having a set amount is so that there is a "concrete dream" in place. You can't pursue a goal that isn't defined. Otherwise, how do you know when you achieve it?

What's YOUR concrete dream?

Ruminations On The Soul

For every birth energy must come from somewhere. Like a new battery, created from fresh new chemicals, energy is transformed from these chemical reactions into electricity and electromagnetic force/fields. Electricity that transmits through the nerves and synapses. Electromagnetic force/field that can be seen through a special camera as an aura around your body.

Then, somewhere, during all that charging going on, a human brain grows awareness of its surroundings. A human brain says “I AM”.

Then, as a child develops, more and more of the subjective mind grows. Emotions grow, opinions form. Interaction with others develops.

Conscious becomes conscience. The values of right and wrong, good and bad are passed on through social interaction.

Liking and loving, disliking and hating develop.

Personality, “human” traits, values, prejudices, preferences, attitudes, and perceptions all grow and define each person individually. Amounts of creativity and imagination develop independently for each person. Where one person becomes Da Vinci, another becomes Thomas Edison, another becomes Mozart, still another never looks up from the hole being dug or the same menial (though necessary) task being done day after day with no further thought than the completion of the task.

Under the microscope, every brain may look the same physically. They may have the same general amount of voltage. But no two brains think perfectly alike. Every brain reacts to its environment in its own unique, “subjective” way.
Here is your SOUL. Unique in every person. The spark in each new baby that grows into a unique individual, no matter how many people are born! Does the soul lie in wait to manifest itself in the child or does it develop with the child. Or is this interaction a combination of the two.

So how, exactly, do you define your soul? There is no definitive answer to this. Every attempt to answer this question has some roots in your own personal perceptions. The closest answer is usually “It's just me”. At the very core of your being, words fail to describe adequately the feelings that you alone experience. A lot of words can be agreed upon in regard to what you feel. But nobody else can feel exactly what YOU feel. They cannot feel how your “heart tugs” when you see a child playing with a puppy. Or experience the exact sense of satisfaction and relief when you look at a summer sun going down after you complete your long day's work.

So, when you're gone from this earth, where does your soul go? Nobody can personally answer this question. But, since that energy departs your body when your soul leaves, then it's pretty safe to presume that the soul is made of energy. And the only immediate destination can be into the air.

Surrounding this entire planet is a vast field of electromagnetic force. It has been observed that many birds use this field to find their way to different locales. This field has been “seen” through our technological devices. The proof is there that it exists.

Is this the final destination of our souls? Or do they travel further into an electromagnetic energy field further away? Are our souls still cognizant when they leave us? Can souls materialize in our world? If souls can materialize in our world after “death” then there has to be some form of consciousness that remains with them. Everyone has to answer these questions for themselves.

Edgar Cayce's dreams showed a host of entities dressed in white, conscious and beneficent. They addressed many philosophical and practical issues of mankind. There were recorded reports of Jesus coming to people down through time. There have also been countless recountings of visions of angels on earth. There are religions that hold to the elevation of the spirit through continued returns of the spirit to earth until the ultimate plane of enlightenment is achieved for each soul. This, of course, includes the belief in reincarnation.

In support of those beliefs, the spirit must be stored in a “location” near enough to be rebound to the physical presence of earth. To be returned to a new human vessel for continued enlightenment. Or, once enlightenment is achieved, the ability to manifest in whatever form here on earth. Or, in the case of malevolence, a strong enough level of energy to remain behind in the form of a poltergeist or “evil spirit”.

We cannot and do not have definitive answers for these questions. We can only, each, believe what each of us will. The workings of the world that we cannot explain will always leave each of us with a choice of belief. Science can never completely provide answers for how or what we each think or believe.

I have rationalized that God is an entity or the spiritual core of a group of entities that surrounds this earth or this universe in a pure energy form. I cannot prove this and I cannot explain why it is. All the arguments about the words “created in his image” can be batted around eternally. I do not choose God's image. I simply try to understand it from a simple, human perspective.

Theologians constantly argue about the nature of God and how God is defined in the writings in the Bible. Clergymen have been trying to decide how to teach and influence the masses since way before the Nicene Creed was decided. But, no matter what they decide, your beliefs will always truly be based on your own perceptions. What you perceive to be real, or accept on faith, based on your own feelings. The feelings that you have in your own, unique soul.

What makes you feel good mentally usually determines your actions. What you do to others that makes you feel bad mentally often adjusts your actions toward others. The “Golden Rule” exists in practically every continued religion on earth. This one basic rule reaches almost everyone at the level of their soul. That is probably why this one rule persists at the very core of all these religions.

Each of us has our own unique soul. The reality we share is a social consciousness. The details of our reality reside in each of us. No matter which religious institution you are a member of, your perspective of the details of reality will always be painted by the brush of your unique soul.