OUT OF THE BOX

D.W.Major, thank you for commenting here. I'm ...

2011-03-29T12:10:54.028+01:00

D.W.Major, thank you for commenting here. I'm afraid I have neither the power,influence or means to help you but I wish you the best of luck and success with your invention.

Dear Editor For your consideration I give you som...

2011-03-29T11:26:06.988+01:00

Dear Editor

For your consideration I give you some information about my work which is
Hypersonic Zero Emission Transportation.
This Invention is ready to be implemented within a very short time.
The truth is that the Oil companies Airbus Boeing and so on try to stop it and so far they succeeded but I feel strongly about my work and hope that you can help promoting this Invention and the Idea behind it.
That is to be free and live in unity with the earth without loosing our comfort zone.
In the wake of the search for sustainable transportation I offer a solution.
I hold the Patent on this Invention and I believe strongly this is the way forward.

Respectfully

D.W. Major
CEO
Zero Emission Transportation Ltd
http://WWW.ZEROEMISSIONTRANSPORTATION.WEBS.COM
London
UK

Hello John, sorry for the delay in responding. I d...

2009-12-06T22:57:11.039Z

Hello John, sorry for the delay in responding. I don't always see comments which are entered long after I've posted something and this project had a very brief start last January then kind of fizzled out.
I very much appreciate your point of view but at present, I feel that these sort of discussions don't really lead anywhere and that the best one can do is to focus on whatever talents or skills one has and try to develop them in a consistent way. My tendency to venture into "world-changing" mode is more of a character flaw and an escape from reality than an asset. But many thanks for your comment.

Yes, old energy debates (powered by fear)are non-p...

2009-11-25T18:42:11.940Z

Yes, old energy debates (powered by fear)are non-productive. I have some insight I'd like to impart re: the ability in us all to change our perception toward the world's tumultous times. To change our perception requires a release from judgement. Judgement is fear based. We weren't created by fear we were created by Love. To invalidate negativity (in a polarized existence) shows resistance. The key is to understand, embrace and transmute our fear back to Love. I'm not a product of 'new-age' thought, not a guru. I'm a 'work in progress' and simply possess a heightened awareness of my feminine energy component which represents Heart (Love.) The human mind to date has represented a patriarchal fearful dominance which clearly demonstrates imbalance or, the lack of Love. [There is no atheism except for the denial of one's Self identity.] Furthermore, [the root cause of all evil is separation from Oneness.] I await a response from the author and I'm more than willing to participate in resolution to our consciousness predicament. As Being is sustenance . . . thank you.

Anonymous: I assume you're attempting to be funny?...

2009-03-05T13:38:00.000Z

Anonymous: I assume you're attempting to be funny? I admit to my 'project' being naive, yes. But "nuking the entire area" (while blowing party tooter) is, even as a fantasy, beyond my naive powers to comment upon.

I'm all for doing the impossible, seeing the invis...

2009-03-05T09:30:00.000Z

I'm all for doing the impossible, seeing the invisible, touching the untouchable and breaking the unbreakable, but this is just naive:

"Ideas which do not pretend to be solutions to the complex problems behind these conflicts but which focus only on means of putting an immediate stop to the killing and maiming."

Nuke the entire area. Then name the sea of glassy trinitite 'Tranquility', for there will be conflict there nevermore.

Killing? Stopped. Maiming? Stopped. Peace? Sure... a peace swept by fallout winds across plains of no living sound.

Hooray for thoughtless solutions!
*blows party tooter*

Thanks 'bacob jarton'. I appreciate your visit and...

2009-01-17T03:22:00.000Z

Thanks 'bacob jarton'. I appreciate your visit and certainly agree about the need to listen and talk and especially to create and perform. The 'creating and performing' ideas are the sort I'm looking for, particularly grassroots inspirations which do not depend on government bureaucracies. I have no faith in bureaucracies of any kind and this project is an attempt to invent positive scenarios which do not depend on them.

From Herbert Brun:

People who want to change something need to learn listening, talking, creating, performing.

Listening and talking are social building blocks, not pastimes.

Let there be a Listening Office, a Talking Office, a Creating and Performing Office.

I imagine this as a series of government bureaucracies, competing in parallel with anarchist-grassroots versions.

O.K.

I think the moral of what I'm about to write is th...

2007-08-08T15:19:00.000+01:00

I think the moral of what I'm about to write is that outside of one box is the same thing as inside another box. A "box," the way we use it in this expression, is a conceptual framework. If you think outside a particular conceptual framework, you're automatically reaching into a different one.

So last night in my dream there is this very loving unmarried couple in their mid-30s, white people with straight, dark-brown hair, and they're walking hand-in-hand into a park in or near Los Angeles, California. It's evening.

She tells him he has become a vampire, and would like to make him a vampire too. He's totally in favor of that. Her lips push forward, her jaws elongate, and long, sharp canine teeth grow out of her gums. He takes his shirt off, leans forward, and she nips him on the back, just enough to break the skin. She's not the kind of vampire that needs to drink blood to survive.

He straightens up, his mouth undergoes the same transformation, and he bites her a little too. They disappear into the night holding hands like Batman and Batgirl.

The next evening their friends go looking for them, because they've vanished from home and work. They are flying over Los Angeles in a batplane, like a silent black fighter plane with the cockpit on the underside (because they prefer to sit upside-down). They land near a woman friend. "Where have you been?" "We're vampires now." "Whoa, that can't be a good thing." "Sure it is. Watch this!" And she starts punching him really hard, but because his body is now quite different from what it once was--more supernatural--it doesn't hurt at all, he's just like a totally soft punching bag for her, and he's standing there on the wing of the plane with a huge smile on his face!

Now, what does this have to do with the theme? The fictional characters in my dream went outside the box of the human and into another conceptual framework, which makes no sense from the perspective of their friend, but makes perfect sense from theirs.

Putting my thoughts into this box are the only way...

2007-08-07T22:16:00.000+01:00

Putting my thoughts into this box are the only way they will get posted... a limitation right at the start.

Basically I believe all innovation comes from those who are willing and able to think outside the box. Sometimes they say one generation has to die before something can really take over and grow as people become so defensive of what always was.

As is the case with so many things, I believe a society needs both those who think outside and inside the box. Some develop what has already been done or figured out but others look and think but why not-- this? That totally blows the minds of those who have spent years developing something and then along comes a johnny come lately who suggests it was for nothing. Well it wasn't really for nothing. It was the foundation but from that, the idea can go anywhere that it is physically possible.

So being a typical libra, I think it's important for a culture to have both types-- those inside the box and those who can go outside.

Dave, never mind abstract. Think concrete!

2007-08-07T03:39:00.000+01:00

Dave, never mind abstract. Think concrete!

I'm still pondering the question of identity. I do...

2007-08-07T01:46:00.000+01:00

I'm still pondering the question of identity. I don't do very much abstract thinking any more - I burnt out on it during my first two years of blogging, I think.

Dave, yes it was/is a great conversation - why not...

2007-08-06T23:29:00.000+01:00

Dave, yes it was/is a great conversation - why not join in? I'm sure you have an interesting take on the subject.

Towanda, I agree it's not an either/or situation. I'm just putting the challennge out to see what people will come up with.

not feeling particularly witty today but can offer...

2007-08-06T23:20:00.000+01:00

not feeling particularly witty today but can offer this question -- why does it have to be one or the other? Out OR in? Seems to me we need both...I find myself doing both...

What a great conversation!

2007-08-05T03:34:00.000+01:00

What a great conversation!

Who teaches the teacher?

2007-08-01T13:33:00.000+01:00

Who teaches the teacher?

Am I too late? It's still July, barely...

L...

2007-07-31T14:49:00.000+01:00

Am I too late? It's still July, barely...

Like Dick, I've always had a strong sense of knowing who I am, so this question is a hard one for me to comment upon. My identity doesn't seem mysterious, in fact it seems logical. Knowing who I am doesn't, of course, mean that I've always been able to act on it fully, often because of other people's expectations or needs, but gradually I've found that what really matters is knowing who you are at your core, and then you don't lose it quite so much when in difficult situations or living with limitations.

What is mysterious to me is not so much identity as being. "I AM," said Yahweh, and we can say it to ourselves, and never understand entirely how that could be possible, and yet be absolutely clear that we in fact "ARE," and we are ourselves and no other. My explorations and wonderings about identity as an adult have been more along the lines of who I am in relationship to all the others who are, and what that might mean. It's a question of becoming more fully myself, and at the same time surrendering to the knowledge that we are all parts of one another; I certainly exist in my own individual physicality, and in my own consciousness, but I'm most fully myself when engaged in the ego-less activities Natalie mentions in her list. Moving more deeply into that paradox will be the continuing work of the next years....

One last thing about identity...
Sufis teach th...

2007-07-31T12:00:00.000+01:00

One last thing about identity...
Sufis teach that a human soul is a drop in the Ocean of the Divine One. Once it is realised that the lover is the same substance as the Beloved, all "identity" ceases, and both "become" what they truely are.
"But do not think that the drop alone becomes the Ocean— the Ocean, too, becomes the drop!" Jelaluddin Rumi

Autobiology

My father and mother split vitr...

2007-07-20T21:16:00.000+01:00

Autobiology

My father and mother split vitriolically when I was three.
They had a long nasty custody battle over me.
I ended up mostly with my mom and her second husband
and his three kids, who were much older than me, and
according to the terms of the judge's decision I went to
my father's apartment every other weekend and every other
Thursday afternoon. So I had an odd living situation
and felt that neither place was completely my home
and had to mentally switch gears every time I went
from one place to the other.
I always had friends, but
I spent a lot of time on my own back then too, pondering things.

Around the time I was seven and eight
I was convinced that I was the subject of
an experiment conducted by extraterrestrials
to see how I would react to various situations.
Other people were robots created to see how I would
react to them.
At one point I shared this belief with a close friend
and he said that he thought the same thing about himself.
So I figured there were at least two of us and probably more.
As late as ten I remember thinking I was being spied on.
I was sitting alone in a classroom
and thought there was a camera concealed in a clock,
and I grabbed my penis to insult whoever was looking at me.

This solipsism changed over the next years
into a belief that I and a few others
were vastly superior, intellectually,
to the rest of humanity.
In my freshman year of college
I met a poet girl who struck me as being of the same calibre
and she told me she, too, thought of most people
as being mindless sheep.
She and I were like sparks and gasoline fumes.
Deep in the night in bed with her I dreamed
two planets orbiting around each other
at an incredible rate of speed. Another night
a mountain lion and the moon.
My body has memories of these things
that it doesn't tell my mind.

The other morning, walking to work
up Hetzendorferstrasse,
I was characterizing my earlier selves
by their obsessions.
I've always been fascinated
but the fascinations shift.
If I subtract ten years from me now
I find a man who's passionate about visions
and willing to do dangerous things to achieve them
because he's confident that his death is not written into
that section of the script.
And wondering what to do with those visions
and where he'll live and how he'll earn his bread.
But if I do believe anything today
it's that we are all part of the same massive being.
I believe this because I saw it in a vision
as I lay in a hammock in the jungle:
all the humans in space and time,
I saw together, connected like the twigs and branches
of a single giant plant.

A much younger me was mad to know everything
about whales and dolphins
and dreamed of being a marine biologist
and solving the problem of interspecies communication;
though even then I thought that was a bit beyond me.
The summer I was thirteen
my mom, my stepdad, my stepbrother and I were in Maine
assisting a scientific study of whales. That is,
we'd go out in the boat most days with our friends the scientists and the
boat captain, and that summer, we saw a lot of right whales
at very close range.
I wasn't there the day the whales were mating
and one lifted the front of the boat to warn the people
to stay away.
One night the phone rang at 11PM and we raced out to some
rocky coastline because a lot of dolphins had beached themselves
and needed to be saved.
By the time we got there there was nothing to be done,
others had done it already: thrown some back in the water;
some were already dying and were taken to a building
belonging to the fishing industry and put in tanks
partly filled with water and their skins were kept moist.
I touched one of those dying dolphins. I think it was barely conscious.
Smooth and gray, firm,
and unable to explain to any of us why it had done what it had done.

Some people seem very sure of their own identity; ...

2007-07-16T22:19:00.000+01:00

Some people seem very sure of their own identity; others - like me - are much less so.
I wonder how much of the uncertainty comes about because, somewhere along the line, we started living out other people’s expectations of us? Expectations which diverged from our true nature, and so that nature became suppressed, the loser in a power struggle.

Of course, that idea assumes that there is such a thing as ‘true nature’; something which we are independently of all those external influences - the old nature versus nurture polarity.

As children, we learned to please our parents; as employees we learned to live out the role our employers defined for us; as spouses we continued the desire of young lovers to please the beloved, until the desire was gone and only a shell of habit remained.

Or perhaps it was nothing as overtly coercive as expectations; perhaps it was simply that none of the role models we had available to us in our formative years adequately illustrated all the possibilities open to us. Certainly, in my case, all my relations (I have many cousins mostly a decade or so older than me) followed seemingly identical patterns – ‘good’ jobs (for ‘good’ read secure, dull, conventional, conformist), marriage in mid-20s, then ‘settling down’ to have a family. Any dreams of anything more adventurous were seen as precisely that – just impossible dreams, utterly divorced from reality.

I often feel that I don’t altogether fit in the life that I’ve got – and moreover I’ve felt this pretty much for as long as I can remember. It seems that, without deliberately planning it this way, I’ve constructed a life designed for somebody else. Over the decades, one decision leads to another, and another, and slowly the paths diverge. What is becomes further and further removed from what could have been – what should have been?

Neither path is necessarily any ‘better’ than the other in any material sense, but they’ve led to very different places. In one, I might have felt at home. In this one, I feel something of a stranger, a misfit.

Of course, reality is not always so black-and-white – I’m painting a picture of extremes in order to make the point. The influences which make us who we are complex and continually changing, and if there is a power struggle between external expectations and internal identity, it may ebb and flow.

But one of the strengths of blogging is that, since it is a means of self-expression, it can provide a medium where that ‘true self’ may find a voice.

Hi. Here's my take on this again. Hope this make...

2007-07-16T15:11:00.000+01:00

Hi. Here's my take on this again. Hope this makes it through.

Defining who I am is a very curious endeavor because there's no one clear cut or simple answer.

All that I am is a result of the lessons learned from all the varied life circumstances I went through. As life is continuing learning process, identity a work in progress.

How I look at life is also a result of lessons leaned from decisions made in the past. This too contribute to who I am, what I stand for and what is valuable to me.

Consequentially, how I deal will people and life circumstances is culled from all of the above.

I agree with Dick, identity does defy provenance. Its experiences that is the result of life circumstances that shape a person's identity. We learn something new every time we are confronted with the result of a decision we've made in the past,

Wow, you started this off with a bang, as in thing...

2007-07-13T16:44:00.000+01:00

Wow, you started this off with a bang, as in things I have thought a lot about and could write a book on each of them.

On the DNA, I have said that for a long time that it might carry memory markers and as you said, could explain all of these 'mutual' memories. It also is possible you were the Egyptian queen in a past life and the reason so many remember the same past life is that they were in that era but not necessarily the person. So you end up with a lot of Cleopatras but most were serving maids, knew her and remember the details, claiming the moreimportant identity as their past life personally.

There is no knowing on any of it as we can't prove from where come these memories or coincidences. Interesting though and you certainly do resemble her. They say we do through one lifetime to another and Tina Turner sure doesn't look like her this go round-- if she was her in the past.

My personal past life in Egypt (if there are such things) was likely as a temple priestess which translates to forced sex supposedly for god and not a good memory set at all.

On identity, it is weird you wrote about this as I have had the same thoughts recently; and as you said in my blog, it's kind of amazing how this all comes together that so many of us think the same thing at the same time. Like an energy wave comes through.

(Natalie, it looks like maybe this one didn't "tak...

2007-07-13T12:19:00.000+01:00

(Natalie, it looks like maybe this one didn't "take" the first time, if this is a duplicate, please delete one, lol!)

My experience is that identity can be a slippery thing, and that even if you yourself feel you have a firm grasp on who you think you are, others may not agree. At all. Not even close.
I sort of live that.
First, I can look back over my life and see that "who I am/was" has changed periodically, as I found new loves, new interests, new friends. I have come to think of these phases in my life as incarnations, even though my body has continued to live. Yes, there is a central thread of "me" that runs through it all, but if there were such a thing as a time machine, I doubt that my 10-year old self would ever think she would become my 47-year old self. She wouldn't recognise me as the future her.
Secondly, the way I identify myself is radically different to how my parents, especially my mum, identifies me. I am a Sufi Muslim. I have been for more than a decade. But just a few weeks ago my mum said how glad she was that I had "given all that up". She said this because I don't fit her stereotype of a Muslim woman (she's a lapsed Christian, btw, as are my dad and sister) because I "don't dress the way those women do". So in her mind, because I wear jeans and a t-shirt, I'm something other to her than how I see myself.
If you look at your day, you too might get the feeling that who you are at work is not quite who you are at home, down the pub, at church, with the kids, out shopping, etc. I've observed that most of us have "additions" to our central core personality and identity that we put on and take off like we do our clothes. Mum in the morning whilst getting the kids off to school, office manager in the workplace, mum again later when the kids are back, spouse / lover / partner when the other adult in your life comes home, dance floor chick if you get to go out clubbing with your mates. We are still "Chris" or "Alice" or "Cait" or "Mike" at the core, but we put on those other clothes.
Part of the purpose of a spiritual path, awareness path, etc. is to discover and develop our core identity to the point where the clothes can come off, and we ARE who we are, full stop. At that point, we can finally experience our true self, and the "self" of the rest of creation.
There's a quote from "Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah" by Richard Bach that I really like:
"You are led through your lifetime by the inner learning creature, the playful spiritual being that is your real self.
Don't turn away from possible futures before you're certain you don't have anything to learn from them.
You're always free to change your mind and choose a different future, or a different past."

I guess I would completely agree with Dick that "I...

2007-07-12T15:10:00.000+01:00

I guess I would completely agree with Dick that "I have a powerful sense of identity that defies provenance".

I regard my life as an almost unmitigated disaster. Staying alive is no small achievement; still, I would have liked a lot of other things I haven't done and haven't had.

Nonetheless, if I ask myself: who would I like to be? the answer is unhesitatingly that I cannot imagine being anyone else but me, cannot imagine *wanting* to be anyone else but me.

I have no idea what I mean by 'me', but my heart and all my instincts certainly know.

I presume it is the same for most people.

One of life's great and wondrous mysteries.

OUT OF THE BOX

D.W.Major, thank you for commenting here. I'm ...

Dear Editor For your consideration I give you som...

Hello John, sorry for the delay in responding. I d...

Yes, old energy debates (powered by fear)are non-p...

Anonymous: I assume you're attempting to be funny?...

I'm all for doing the impossible, seeing the invis...

Thanks 'bacob jarton'. I appreciate your visit and...

O.K.

I think the moral of what I'm about to write is th...

Putting my thoughts into this box are the only way...

Dave, never mind abstract. Think concrete!

I'm still pondering the question of identity. I do...

Dave, yes it was/is a great conversation - why not...

not feeling particularly witty today but can offer...

What a great conversation!

Who teaches the teacher?

Am I too late? It's still July, barely...L...

One last thing about identity...Sufis teach th...

AutobiologyMy father and mother split vitr...

Some people seem very sure of their own identity; ...

Hi. Here's my take on this again. Hope this make...

Wow, you started this off with a bang, as in thing...

(Natalie, it looks like maybe this one didn't "tak...

I guess I would completely agree with Dick that "I...

Am I too late? It's still July, barely...

L...

One last thing about identity...
Sufis teach th...

Autobiology

My father and mother split vitr...