Existential Angst

A Vantage Point in Time

2006-04-13T19:08:00.000-07:00

I haven’t posted in a while so I thought I would check in.

In my previous posts I had talked about being more positive and that it was “working for me”. As with any claim, there should be empirical evidence to show that it is correct. Well, I think there are at least two empirical claims I can make for this lifestyle change. The first is that my blood pressure has dropped from 150/90 to 130/75. I haven’t changed what I eat and, until bike season hit Maine, I hadn’t been exercising. The second is that I don’t consume alcohol as much. I’ve gone from a daily drinker to an occasional drinker. I did this because I just didn’t like how I felt, not that I had a drinking problem. Now I feel better than ever, I eat and drink because I enjoy it and it brings pleasure, and not just to feel different.

Even though I have given up my personal history, I have been fascinated with my ancestral history. My personal history is just my beliefs about why I am the way I am. It at best serves as a reminder of what it took for me to get where I am today but more often forces me to serve it and maintain it. It doesn’t want me to change (i.e. “how can I be happy when so many people I love have died. It would be shameful to ”).

My ancestral history is quite different. It wants me to change and be a better person. As I imagine my great grandfather fighting in the Indian wars of 1860’s (on the side of the Indians), and his struggle to make it to Canada, I feel his courage. When I think of my grandfather immigrating to America at 16 because his father died 7 years before and there is no hope for him on the farm so he is trying his luck at the mills in Maine. Both of my grandfathers fought in the World Wars, one in the first and the other in the second. They were brave men.

My fathers-father died when he was very young, just like his father did before him. That brave Indian from three generations ago also lost his father and mother in the war. In each generation the children that had a chance to grow up with a father did better than the children that grew up without one. The lesson is so clear to me that being a father is more important than just my son’s future but to many generations from me. The investment I make in my son for education, helping him start his life financially and modeling the attributes I find so compelling from my ancestors (being brave, taking chances, caring for others and wisely invest your resources) is not just for his sake, but for generations to come. Understanding my history allows me to see myself as a member of a community that spans both time and space lifts me up and makes me better. Understanding where I come from isn’t an attempt to find an excuse for myself, to play the role of being a victim of my past but get a vantage point in time so that I can move forward with confidence.

Top Ten

2005-12-03T20:12:00.000-08:00

Here is my Top 10 best advice to gain higher consciousness (nod to Dave Letterman). Many of these things you may have heard before from other people and some of it is my own. All I can say is these are the things that are working for me right now.

10. Following your “stream of joy” only leads to happiness so don’t leave your stream of joy. When you follow your heart there are no bad decisions, only ones that you learn from.
9. Music holds both happiness and sadness. Like all “wholeness” entities, such as silence and existence, music holds paradoxes that must be examined. It is the silence between the notes is what makes the music. So much like own lives, it is the silent moments that God talks to us. What is God saying to you?
8. Nullifying your life is a symptom of the problem not the solution. If you nullify yourself with drugs or alcohol then you are simply quieting that which must be heard.
7. Life is an illusion. You are born into a reality of many dimensions. We only explore one, the one most useful to us at his moment. At the highest levels of consciousness we can act as if there is no reality at all.
6. There is no “bottoming out” there is only learning. At times of severe distress, we encounter the ultimate reality and realize there is no bottom.
5. Opportunity knocks once but temptation pounds at the door for a life time. As you ascend to higher levels of consciousness it becomes harder and harder to recognize coincidence from fate. You begin to realize that really they are the same thing with differing amounts of precognition.
4. Stay lost, it is much better than being found. Someone that is lost is always looking for the opportunities around them. They are constantly being at their best. They find what is really in them. Being found only means you don’t need to search anymore. You can rest when you really should be running.
3. There are no solutions, only what works at one level of consciousness or another. It isn’t until you remove reality that you can become a pure logical equation but you can never remove reality so therefore you can only approach absolute zero and fly very high and come close to one. Life is always between null and complete but never either.
2. Your soul loves to be in you and it at one with its destiny. Feel that love for life that it has. Remember that you have been “you” right along yet your body has been changing every day. Tap into that soulful joy and realize how much love is really in you. Then you’ll see you have a great reservoir of love to give away.
1. Look at what is inside you. To see it, just look at how you react to either an unexpected gift or an annoying kid on the street. “The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.” [Luke 6:45]. What is coming out of your mouth?

Be at peace.

Being Positive

2005-11-13T19:22:00.000-08:00

I’ve started down a path that has been the hardest thing I have ever done. I thought raising my son would be the hardest but to raise him right; I must do this first and that is, become a positive person. To be a positive person I have to raise the bar on what I accept for myself and others. I have to become a person that responds with love in the sight of hate. I have to show compassion to those that wrong me. I must be a beacon of hope to the hopeless.

I have been trying very hard to respond to the world with love when I wanted to respond viciousness. I know for sure that what I put into this world is what I get back. It happens over and over again in a karmic sort of way that when evil is repaid with evil only evil triumphs. All one must do is go for a drive and you’ll quickly find a reason to hate somebody.

What I have realized is that I don’t know everything. It seems simple to say but when I think about it I know that I can’t count how many times I have dismissed someone’s opinion because I looked down on them. “They can’t know the answer!” I say but how do I know everything to know this? They may not know the answer but the may have a point of view that leads you to a deeper understanding. I have missed out on educating myself on a host of things because I thought I already had the answers. Children can help you see that you don’t have all of the answers. As the old fairytale show us, a child can see that the emperor has no clothes as all of us adults complement him for his fine wardrobe.

Being a positive person means to me that in every interaction with people or the world, I must remember that it is more important to feel good than be right. Fighting about a parking spot or cutting myself on a plastic package just isn’t worth it. I can find a better place to park and I can find a better way to get into the package. I can realize that if I walked or biked, I would need to find the parking place. If I didn’t have such a need for material things, I wouldn’t need go any where nor fight the packaging.

Life is the journey, not the destination. A positive person sees life as a dance. We are to enjoy every step and every beat. We are to feel the joy of all of our fellow dancers on the floor. Once I saw that the point of life isn’t to go from here to there, from birth to grave, I understood that I didn’t know everything. I don’t know enough to be mean, hateful and evil. I don’t know why certain dancers come in and out of my life. All I know is that feeling good and feeling free is a positive thing for me to do and since it is one thing I do know, it is what I’m going to do.

Harvest

2005-11-04T19:28:00.000-08:00

I made a decision that I would replace every negative thought and action with a positive one. When ever I catch myself complaining, lamenting or otherwise negative I’ve tried to replace it with its opposite. For instance, a coworker that doesn’t seem to understand simple instructions is an opportunity for me to express my patients and develop my teaching skills. A driver that shows poor judgment needs my sympathy, not my horn.

I feel like I understand the message of Jesus on a much deeper level. Jesus made many parables about farming and faith. I feel that on a deeper level as I plant my own seeds in the world around me. If I sow hate, distain and negativity I will reap a harvest of despair. If I can sow just a few seeds into the fertile soil of love, joy and positive energies, like wise I will reap a harvest of goodness.

Jesus also said that he could reap where he did not sow. He made parables of labors that come late to the harvest but are paid equal to those that started early. It seems unfair but the universe doesn’t care about fair. If I give my last dollar to charity but a rich man gives a million, did I not give more because I gave all I had? The universe does not make a distinction in time for goodness, it make a distinction in quality. An honest man working an honest hour doing God’s work can do more than a dishonest man in the world working all his life.

In just two days I feel like I have lived more that I have in the past two years. I’m going to try to stay honest. I will do what I can for others without expectation of them because I know that I will reap where I did not sow. All bad things are just opportunities for me to grow. Having to hold my child while waiting for them to die makes me sure that I have seen bad things. I know now that is time for me to grow.

The Flow of Life

2005-11-03T19:38:00.000-08:00

The flow of life is a stream that comes to me and through me. Sometimes it pools up because the path from God to the world has a blockage within me. That blockage is my self reflection that has a mistaken belief. Currently that belief is that my personal history is what is leading my future. Even when I realize that this is a mistake, the blockage creates as barrier that logic can’t break.

Even thought the solution seems “as clear as the summer’s sun” [Shakespeare’s Henry V], acting on knowledge and just knowing something is profoundly different. Obviously changing my beliefs would remove the blockage. The problem is that the blockage has energy of its own. My history of grief has a “conservation of momentum” that can’t just be stopped. So the wake begins to push the slowing boat forward, toward the rocks, where the driver does not want to go.

It seems clear to me now that what must happen, what will happen, is that the boat must end up on the rocks. Once my current self image is destroyed then my personal history will not matter. I fear this “bottoming out” but it is what must happen. I have seen it in my dreams. I know that until I can love myself I can’t love my neighbor [Jesus, New Testament, check it out] and I can’t love myself as I am today. I’ll have to see what tomorrow brings.

Frustration

2005-10-30T18:57:00.000-08:00

There is a saying, I once heard, in Buddhism that goes something like, “Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.” I have always thought of this as the truth that one should stay humble and simple. Like a superman in disguise, one should keep their “day job” even thought they are at one with the universe.

There is another side to this truth. If one is in the dark, hoping that the room is filled with presents all with your name on them, the light may not bring happiness. You may be surprised by the illumination of the waste and destruction all around you, that was always there, but you could blissfully ignore.

Now you must carry water and chop wood not just to drink and eat but now you see yourself as a part of a system and your place in it. You must chop wood. You must carry water. Others don’t have too, but you are not one of them. If others would just give a little, you could have a lot, but they will never give anything to you.

Buddhist dedicate a lot of time to this issue. They try to explain that you could be reborn into a better position in life if you just keep carrying water and chopping wood. If you give up everything and be a monk, you might be Buddha in the next life.

For what enlightenment I might have, all I know is that it is very frustrating. Since I have been following my dreams, I have come to understand a lot about myself. I see my reality much more clearly. I feel the presence of God in my life. I know my soul deeply wants this life. I can deeply love my wife and child with complete abandon. I want to live like it is my last day, but I have a mortgage to pay. I want to sing and play music with friends but I have to work on the house. I know it is very small of me to complain about what 90% of other people in world would love to have which is just one more reason to prove that I’m not very enlighten at all. I guess tomorrow I’ll be chopping wood and carrying water.

Grieving Native

2005-10-21T20:26:00.000-07:00

What does it mean to be grieving? Over the past five years I have lost four children and a father and a grand father. To understand grief, I think I can make a relation to the concept in Maine over how we make a big deal about being a native born Mainer, a “transplant” who moved from somewhere else to Maine or worst of all, you might be a tourist.

Tourists are the worst because they come to Maine for a short time but yet try to tell us what to do with our forests, ocean and sunshine but don’t understand in any way how we live with them. When a tourist tells us to stop cutting trees, which puts us out of work on land that has cultivated trees meant for forestry, we get mad at them.

Transplants are far more difficult because they can vote, but without a heritage of living from these resources they think we are killing our resources by making our lives from it. Though there are more lobsters in the ocean off the coast of Maine then there has ever been, transplants want more restrictions on the fisheries. I think the lobstermen are doing a find job if they can leave a resource better than when they found it.

Natives of Maine grieve. They see what knee-jerk, short-sighted environmentalist from out of state are doing do our way of life, versus what the native Mainer lives with everyday for whom love the Maine environment and give there lives to it. We see what our own government does to keep our state in poverty under a so called liberal agenda but whose ideas are far from progressive. We pay more for taxes, insurance, housing and almost everything else than our close neighbor New Hampshire. Because we know the difference between what should be happening and what is happening, we grieve.

I think this idea of tourist, transplant and native is true for those who have lost loved ones. We have coworkers who think they are doing the right thing by trying to “talk about it” with us. They are just tourists staying just long enough to make themselves feel better about it. I find that I have to lavish them with forgiveness. They really don’t know what they are talking about and though it is painful to me, they really think they are doing the right thing (in some cases). It is best to forgive and forget them.

Transplants to grieving are the friend-of-a-friend grievers. They are the ones who had a good friend from college that went through what you are going through. They are tough to deal with because they do have good information. Somehow thought the story ends with the friend has gone down a spiral so they now live in gutter or blew their brains out. I guess the motto is, don’t be like them.

Then there are the natives to grieving. It will be the person that does something for you without comments or expectations. They know that you don’t need to be warned about anything. If they tell you their story, it is because you asked. Grievers know that silence is the only thing next to God that cannot be reduced or divided and what you really need is God and some quiet time. So if you ask, implied or spoken, their story always ends with, “…and now, I’m here with you.”

Life Changing

2005-10-17T13:39:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking about the term “Life Changing”. I’ve been undergoing dramatic changes in my inner-life but to the outside observer I can’t believe you’d notice the difference. I drive the same car, live in the same house and am doing the same things. How I feel about these things and my dreams and goals for my life have changed completely. This seems to be ironic that I can be a different person but do the same things.

I could have a life changing event by having my house burnt to the ground, the car stolen and my job lost. It would certainly lead to a lot of changes in my life. When you loose a loved one like a parent or a child, you loose something Inside of your life. The material goods in your life now hold a new meaning and have a new dimension. This dimension for the most part brings sadness to your inner-self as you reflect on the last time they were in your house, your car or what they thought about your job and your life.

This dimension of remorse is a dimension to your life that is always there, but doesn’t show up until it has an emotional impact. This is the real life changing event, the realization that everything in your life doesn’t have just three dimensions. Your things don’t just occupy space and a job isn’t just series of motions over time. I have come to realize that how I feel about the things around me, change me.

My two year old proves this every time he becomes excited about mundane events such as a favorite TV show, seeing a favorite toy or learning something new. Child-like enthusiasm comes from understanding his relationship to the world. He knows that he can be happy about things. He sees this dimension of emotion in everything.

So, I think “life changing” really means becoming conscious of the emotional dimension around us. With this knowledge, we can change our lives and draw close to us that which has meaning and power while removing the things that hold us down and keep us from feeling good.

At the most profound level, understanding that the world around us has an emotional dimension, means that we can change our minds about things and those things will change on that dimension. How I feel about my job is a reflection of the emotional dimension but I can change how I feel about it which changes the job. I can be angry at someone or the memory of someone, and they will reflect the anger back at me every time I think of them. I can forgive them and have that forgiveness reflected back to me, not in the three dimensional world (they may still despise me) but my anger doesn’t work against me as I think of them. To me, that is the real life changing event, to stop working against yourself.

Life Changing Dream

2005-09-03T11:19:00.000-07:00

Wow, all I can say is that I don’t know how my brain could have come up with this one. I have been reflecting on the nature of dreams because I feel there is a connection between them and what happens when we die. I don’t know what that connection is exactly but if you read my posting on “If Dreams Predict the Future” and “Where do Dreams Come From”, it would be hard for me not to think there is a connection.

The dream that has sent me rethinking my life and what I’ve been doing (more importantly expecting) puts me right were I think I want to be with all of the people I thought I wanted to be with. So, I’m standing in a dorm room (because I loved my college experience) with all of my friends and even an ex-girl friend. I’m so happy to see them and I tell them all how loyal of a friend I am to them. One by one, each person tells me how little I matter to them. Each one points out how either they used me or I was over-exaggerating my connection with them. Even the ex-girlfriend calls in her new lover to show me how much I didn’t matter to her.

All of these people somehow are a voice in my head. Some of them have had me chasing an unattainable dream of what kind of person I wanted to be. The others set a bar for my self-worth that I couldn’t achieve. I wasn’t conscious of them but I know for sure that they have influenced the car I drive, the job I have, the activities I pursue and the dreams I set for myself. I can’t believe how much impact they have had.

The last part of the dream was a girl for whom I don’t remember. Even as each of the other people spoke I had initially over looked her presence in the room. She was trying to explain to me that I was a good person, that I was beautiful and that I was already good enough for her. I didn’t have to live up their standards (as she waved her hand at the other people). She couldn’t understand how I could be so foolish as to believe in them instead of myself. She was so right.

I don’t know if I have dreamed at all since that night. If this is the word of God, then she is a wonderful person. If it was my Anima (Carl Jung reference), then she has been heard. If this was just a random coincidence of thoughts and memories, then I am very lucky. I hope it was my Father or one of my children watching from a higher ground that thought they could help me. If so, I thank them and I hope to hear from them again very soon.

I'm on to Something

2005-08-13T19:56:00.000-07:00

I’ve been trying to get in touch with what I’ve been calling the Dreaming Mind. I’ve never felt more creative, moody and emotional. My dreams have been very vivid. Last night, I woke up several times after a dream that was so powerful that my waking mind couldn’t tell where I was or When I was.

One dream that was particularly powerful was in the future and I was contemplating what I was going to do for my 25 wedding anniversary. It was a sunny day, I felt well and I was where I thought was home with people I liked. The problem was that I don’t think I was me. If my dad’s dreams before he died has thought me anything is that dreams are not limited to the Self (see previous posts). When I woke up, I didn’t know where I was or when it was. This happened several more times that night.

I don’t know exactly what this means but I’m taking it as that I’m getting closer to something. The Dreaming Mind is very powerful influence over my consciousness. I’m communing with it by imagining that there is a dreamer of the dream in my head. I see this dreamer like a silent DJ of knowledge, he plays a dream to speak to me. He plays the emotion that I need to know what he feels. I’m finding that I’m moving through life’s little problems with a bit more ease. I’ll keep you posted on where this goes.

Comments

2005-08-13T19:55:00.000-07:00

I want to start off with my disgust with advertisers adding comments to my blog to sell their products. If you want me to talk about a product, you should email me and I’ll think about it and how it fits into what I’m talking about. My apologies to any reader that may have been ambushed by one of these spam comments in my blog. I’ve deleted them when I discover them. I don’t want people to have to jump through hoops to read what I write, but if these jerks can’t be stopped, I’ll have to force people to register to add comments.

The Dreaming Mind

2005-08-08T18:08:00.000-07:00

After thinking about it deeply, I’ve concluded that the body and soul have two parts that represents each. The body has consciousness. The body cares about getting the brain to think about important issues such as ‘what’s for lunch’ and ‘can I have sex’? The body drives our consciousness to examine the environment, make plans to satisfy our needs and execute them.

The soul has something less easy to get our hands on. Our souls speak to us by dreams, myths and music. When our consciousness is quite, we can sense the soul. So the soul is represented by the Dreaming Mind. The Dreaming Mind is what listens to our consciousness endless talking and observes our world as a person behind the eyes.

Here is the Really Big Thing, consciousness dies but the Dreaming Mind only closes a window. The Dreaming Mind is something that was here before the consciousness formed. There is a beautiful poem that refers to us as children when we were at one with God and brothers to birds and bees. I think our soul's Dreaming Mind is just like that child, at one with God and nature.

So we fear the death of consciousness. We are scared of loosing our loved ones, our money or our status. We work so hard for the body, we hate to see it go. If I can change my perspective to the Dreaming Mind, I see that all of these things are only temporary. The Dreaming mind enjoys life in the moment for eternity. It doesn’t care about bodily needs because it is only shell to view the world.

I don’t know about the nature of the Dreaming Mind. Does it reincarnate? Is it bound to our body or just hitching a ride? I'll have to think about it some more.

Where We Are

2005-08-04T06:05:00.000-07:00

I’ve had a long hiatus from my blog. I wished I could say it was because everything was going so well that I just didn’t need to write about it. In March, my wife and I lost another pregnancy at 32 weeks. After the successful birth of our son, we thought all of our problems were behind us. This loss was particularly devastating because it was without any explanation. She seemed to have just died one morning. A week before we had seen the preeminent neonatal specialist in the state who gave us the hope that this pregnancy was fine.

While my wife was trying to give birth a wonderful nurse told us something unusual. She said that she believed that on another plain of existence we made a deal to carry my daughter for as long as she could stay even though we knew that the stay would be brief. We agreed to give her the chance at life. It sounded like something we’d do, but it takes a lot faith to believe in such a thing. I think it was the fact she had so much faith that we all felt it and it made her such a wonderful nurse. I don’t know about other plains of existence but I do know some people are right where they should be.

I Think Therefore I Am

2004-12-18T16:51:00.000-08:00

Why do I think I exist? It seems like a simple question but when I reflect on “I think therefore I am”, I’m lead to ponder the subjective side of that equation. “I think” is an action my brain performs. I have written programs that “think” about what a user might want but we wouldn’t attribute an individual identity to the program. Just because I have a natural ability to think doesn’t make my existence possible.

What if I said “I remember my Self, therefore I am.” Is it that we remember who we are and continue our existence from the same reference point, the Self, that makes us exist? There are huge ramifications from this if it is true. If I am only be because I was me a moment ago, that means if I change something about myself in the now, in the future I will not be who I was. In a way this is an old story, person is poor but honest gets a lot of money. The money changes the person until all of their old friends don’t like them any more. Person realizes they have changed and leaves the money to go back to the friends. There are even more archetypal stories that suggest that we can change who we are.

It also means Alzheimer’s victims are literally robbed of who they are. Their existence is wiped way. This is where my corollary starts to fall apart. My grandfather had Alzheimer’s disease, and though he forgot who he was, I knew him well. His existence didn’t die with him or from the disease because I remembered it.

I’m not sure what this all means, but I am beginning to see that existence is a shared phenomenon between the world and myself. I exist because the world exists and we remember each other. So long as we remember, we can’t die.

Perceptions

2004-12-11T17:42:00.000-08:00

The reason I am concentrating on dreams so much is because of my dad telling me in detail about a special even in my life before he died. I think there is a connection between what we dream, the reality that we perceive and the “real world”/Truth/ultimate reality/etcetera. If there is a connection between me and the spiritual world then I have not lost anyone because I am always with them outside of time.

I saw a neat show about the limitations of human perception. The last segment of the show was a study where people had to count the number of times the basketball players passed a ball to each other. In the middle of the game, out walks a man in a gorilla suit and waves to the camera and walks off. Only a quart of the people in the study saw the man in the gorilla suit. Then the show rewinds to several segment of itself where there was a man in a gorilla suit in the background that I did not notice.

So, it seems pretty clear from a scientific point of view that we, in human form, are not very good at perceiving everything around us. In many ways it is good to have a narrow focus. It allows us to hold a conversation in a noisy room, find a friends face in the crowd or even hunt our prey on a grocery shelf.

I think there is a perception we can have at different times in our lives when the data that we concentrate on is not what we have been looking at all along. It is a big leap of faith but I think my dad was seeing more, his perceptions were expanding, as he was dying. I don’t know why this would happen but I know that his ego died many months before he did. I know this because he often hugged me and when he could speak he only wanted me to know how much he loved me. This wasn’t the man I knew all of my life. The man I grew up with was cold, distant and very often mean. He was a totally hostile driver and didn’t mind using sign language to let everyone else know how he felt if you know what I mean.

My current thinking on the matter is that dreams allow us to see the man in the gorilla suit. Dreams let us move unabated through time and have interactions that our ego driven selves don’t believe are possible. I believe that once we break through our ego, we will have the perception that my father had, where he could know me from my eyes and my feelings and love me as much as I loved him.

2004-12-10T16:29:00.000-08:00

If I light a candle and then use the flame to light a second candle are the two flames the same? If I blow out the first flame and leave the second one to burn for an hour but then relight the first, are they the same flames that we started with an hour ago? Is the relight candle the same flame that started the first candle?

I have son, is he me? If I was cryogenically frozen until he turned my age and I was thawed at that moment so that we were the same age, am I still the man that fathered him? After being re-vitalized, am I even the same person I was or am I someone new?

The second set of questions seems easier to answer but if I think deeply about it, I can answer all of these questions, yes and no. The flames are not the same as they were a moment ago but they are not different. I am not the man I was 10 minutes ago let alone 10 years ago. No matter what happens in the space of time or what that time period is, we are all not the same and we are not different in our time continuum.

So what is it about us that remain the same from moment to moment? My memories changes, my bodies cells are dying and new ones are talking there place every minute of the day. I have heard that every 7 years we have completely changed all of the materials of our body so quite literally we are new people about every 7 years. I know I am the same but I’m different as well. I’ll have to think about it some more.

Dreams Predict the Future

2004-12-08T17:07:00.000-08:00

Last night I had a dream that intertwined with reality but the dream had to know of what was going to happen in order to make the story work out. In this dream, I predicted my wife coming to bed before she actually did. This isn't the first time I have dreamed something and then have reality somehow match up with the dream or vice versa. As anyone else experienced this?

Thoughts on Life and Death

2004-12-05T08:46:00.000-08:00

As I think about life and death, I become torn between many ideas that are hard for me to hold in my head at once. First is the Buddhist Truth of Impermanence, that all things manifest and stop manifesting and that this process is occurring all of the time. The next is the Hindu idea of Ultimate Consciousness and lastly is the Christian idea of a soul.

Impermanence helps me understand my children’s deaths. My boys died from Twin-to-Twin Transference Syndrome, a disease where they shared the blood supply from on placenta. This cause one of them to die of heart failure with too much blood and the other to die from a lack of blood. A year later my daughter died from a genetic disease. Impermanence tells me that for these children the conditions for them to manifest were not sufficient. Sort of like a match without enough sulfur to burn to start a flame. I wonder if my living son is one of the twins that could manifest or if he is some one new. Buddhism would say he isn’t the same and he isn’t different. Just like I am not my father, but a part of him lives in me.

So, do children that never grow up have an ego consciousness or are they purely Ultimate or Universal Consciousness? They didn’t have time even learn a language to have an internal dialog for ego consciousness to express itself. Yet, I know that through my eyes there is a “Watcher” that sees the universe and my ego talks to someone for whom is a “Listener” and they have been with me all of my life. I have changed a lot over the years but if I think deeply, I know that this universal consciousness is in me. Is there were my children, father and forefathers are? Do they watch through my eyes and hear me through my ego internal dialog?

Do I have a soul? I think so. In a Robert Pirsig sort of way, I believe the quality of the answer to be too low to say that there is nothing eternal about us. If we simply say that there is some force that seems to be beyond any one cell, organ or limb that makes us essentially who we are, that is close enough to a soul for me.

Here’s my logic problem, if we have an eternal soul in us but everything in this dimension is Impermanent then the soul can’t be in this dimension. If I’m attached to a soul that is eternal and it is in an eternal place, then a part of me is in an eternal place right now. So, when I die my soul doesn’t go anywhere because it is already there and therefore apart of me is already there. So, I am with my children, my father and all that live through me right now, but yet I can not experience them because my ego consciousness is in this dimension and it can not understand the eternal dimension.

I think all of these ideas belong together like some sort of physics universal theory but I can’t do the math to get them resolve each other. I sort of feel like these ideas are three windows all looking at the same thing each with different prospective on that “thing”. I’ll keep posting as I get new ideas.

Where do Dreams come from?

2004-12-04T18:37:00.000-08:00

I studied dreams in college as I was getting my degree in psychology in books by C. G. Jung and Sigmund Freud. I looked that dreams as phenomenon with a certain fascination as one might look into a fish tank and wonder what the fish are thinking. My dreams were scary, fun and occasionally prophetic with what we call Déjà vu.

Before my Dad died of lung cancer, he asked me some questions about my time in college. He asked me about certain events of a particular day, the last day of my freshman year. He said to me that he had several dreams of me walking in the ornamental garden outside of my dorm but that my thinking wasn’t right and that I was terribly lonely and emotionally distraught. He also described how I was with several of my friends and they were not thinking right and we all went in to the woods behind the garden, past the shed and into woods I had not been in before. I agreed that this was true and I recognized that he knew what was going on at that moment for me and he went on to say that I didn’t like what I saw and that I felt that needed to come home. I agreed again. Then he leaned forward in his chair and said, “as I draw closer, I see these things in my dreams” with his hand in front of his face.

There is important information that I need to share with you to understand the significance of what he said. First, he never went into the ornamental garden let alone the shed behind it. He did not know that I had taken LSD that day for the first time and that it made me not “think right”. I was terribly lonely at that time because I couldn’t get a girl friend and my room mate had abandoned me months before for his girl friend so that I was completely alone. I remember that I met a group of friends that had also dropped acid at the same time as me in the garden. There was a moment when I was sure that I heard “death” and felt that I needed to move out of the garden where we went past the shed and into the forest behind it. I didn’t like the idea of being in a wood that I didn’t know so I took off on my own to get back to the dorm. At that time the LSD was strongly affecting me and I felt like “death” was right behind me and I was scared and wished I was home. I joined up with some friends and felt better and enjoyed the rest of my “trip” and haven’t really thought much about it since then.

I’m not advocating the use of drugs in any way, many bad things in my life came from drugs. I used LSD several more times after this event and they didn’t have any significant meaning so there is no reason for me to believe that they “helped” in this experience at all.

This conversation with my dad leaded me to some very fundamental questions.

1. How could he see my experience that happened 12 years ago and why that particular experience?
2. What caused him to dream this at all, is there a consciousness that decided to show this to him?
3. Was I as close to death as he was and somehow we crossed paths in a different dimension? Are there other dimensions that control what we dream?

I reject any argument that would suggest that this is a coincidence or that it is fabricated by my dad. He had no knowledge of any of these events yet he knew the date it happened and the places it occurred in that he never saw personally and he knew how I felt, most importantly, which he couldn’t have known because we were not in contact with each other at the time. Most importantly, why would he tell me a lie as he was dying, there is no motivation for such an action. I was there and he wanted to tell me something honest and true, he didn’t understand the dreams he was having and wanted me to verify them to be as true as they seemed to him. That was his motivation for telling me his dreams period. I, of course, need to come to grips with what this means in terms of the universe we live in.

Welcome

2004-12-04T13:13:00.000-08:00

Welcome to my blog. I have decided to publish my thoughts as I come to grips with deaths of my family members. I hope that I may help and be helped by those that have traveled this way. I have a lot of story to tell so I suspect this blog will take a while to complete. Thank you for your interest in this journey.