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All my life I was getting into trouble... the cops were called in.  I was chastised and returned like a small annoying fish to a pond.  One day I guess I went too far and  I was eventually removed from the pond, the city life, and I was taken up into a spaceship planet above the Earth where I could be supervised. 

The policeman was friendly enough, he walked with me explaining this new community, from the corner of my eye I saw my cat Neptune walking amongst bookshelves...

In this new community  that resembled a beautiful small island, lived many types of people from all over the world.  The grass was lush, small huts and gardens embraced the near shoreline. 

Children played with each other, children from all over the world, natives from India, and Peru, and China, and many places I simply did not recognize, but I did not feel a part of their games; I was alone.

I felt shunned by them all for what I had done on the planet below, and one day I saw some monks having some kind of a ceremony and I quietly snuck in and sat down in the back, hoping I could be accepted by them, but one noticed me right away and made me leave, giving me angry condemning looks all the while. 

Whenever I saw them they gave me dirty looks, but all I wanted was to... I didn't know what I wanted, and they shooed me away again and again. 

Time passed, feeling despondent, sad, alone, unwanted, when I went down to the shore to just get away from it all, the water was beautifully clear, shallow, and rocks glistened below the surface of the water like treasure, it was stunning and... suddenly a small girl no more than six years old ran into the water right in front of me and was hit by a bus and killed instantly; I cried out profoundly at the loss of this innocent child. 

I bowed my head, unable to rise for some time before turning back to the shore.  From this point on I didn't care whether I was unwanted,  I didn't care that the communities ostracized me.  I didn't care about anything anymore, my view of everything had been changed. I understood how the small thoughtless actions in my life had hurt others, and I knew I could not live like that anymore. 

When I saw the monks again a long while later they were all in a row singing, some new ceremony had commenced.  I figured they still didn't want me around, and I received more condemning stares, but this time I did not judge them, I did not feel hurt by them, they did not sting, the loss of that child forever stained upon my heart, I did not want anything anymore except perhaps to be free of the suffering for what I had done to deserve their condemnation, and to atone for making so many people's lives so hard for so many years.  I came closer, and before I knew it they had moved in a circle around me, but not for me, with me, and I found myself standing before the leader of their community... it was then I understood, they had been waiting for me to want to change, and I had come home.

Goodnight Moon -> The Hungry Caterpillar -> Where the Wild Things Are -> Grover's Monster at the end of this Book -> Corduroy -> Curious George -> Shel Silverstein -> Tin Tin -> The Phantom Tollbooth -> James Bond -> JRR Tolkien's Complete Works -> Douglas Adams -> Edgar Allen Poe -> Herman Hesse -> Carlos Castaneda -> Poetry -> Zen Teachings -> Winnie the Pooh -> The Illuminatus Trilogy -> The Bible -> Jesus without the Bible -> Bhagavad Gita -> Koran -> I-Ching -> Tarot -> Science Fiction -> Folklore -> History -> Plays -> Psychology -> Textbooks -> Mythology -> Lyrics -> Autobiographies -> Richard Brautigan -> Olaf Stapledon -> Tanya -> Goodnight Moon

"You're either taking up space or you're giving.  Salvation hangs out at every street corner.  If you start giving to others, you'll feel your pain fading away.  If you want to kill yourself, kill what you don't like.  Kill narcissism.  You can kill yourself, but that doesn't mean you gotta stop living.  Kill the part that's all about you and nobody else, because that's the part that makes you want to curl up and die."

I miss the friendship Laura and I started with, it was fun, and light, and adventurous, she vanished from my life without a word, broke my heart and still to this day hasn't really talked to me like a real person, and that makes me a little sad, but other than that I'm doing great, because I've learned a lot about 2-way street friendships, and to be wary of that idyllic honeymoon that shows us what we want from each other, and not what we truly are, and I won't be hurt again because of that.  I knew to take it slow, which was smart, but you still tend to crash into things when you're going slow and the other person makes a disappearing act.  Nothing really goes slower than vanishing... perhaps someday humans will find a way to communicate their differences and through their fears, until then... read the roadsigns, caution ahead, hearts are fragile, but it could be worse, you could be dead.

Today's meditation from me to you

Close your eyes
Take a few deep breaths
Now, imagine a world without sight... keep your eyes closed for 30 seconds imagining this world...
Now open your eyes.

Everything you see is a blessing.

The Bible: Simplified

I wouldn't believe that God wrote the Bible unless he told me himself. Until then I will believe man wrote the Bible, partly inspired, partly to control the masses, partly wise, partly deceptive, but altogether suspect and demanding of questioning and further enquiry. God gave mankind the gift of free will, self awareness, an inquisitive mind, the gift of life, the breath of life, I think man is better off without the Bible, there needs to be a simpler system to go by, how about this simple rule: Treat everyone and thing as if they are yourself, your own family, your own loved one, your own friend.

15 Horror Cliches and Houses

1. If it's priced to sell, it's foundation is in hell.  
2. If there's a chandelier, it's gonna fall on someone at some point in the movie and likely just miss them.  
3. If it has all its original fixtures, it means no one's lived in it long enough to need to replace them.  
4. If there's a strange noise and you find a hole outside in the roof where tiny birds live, it's likely ghosts using the birds to mask their sound, but you'll investigate it anyway, in the dark, by yourself.
5. A ghost will always try to seduce you
6. Ghost bodies move slow, ghost heads move very quickly.  
7. A 1980's work music video montage is a bad sign.  
8. Family pets are the first to know, then kids
   
9. Young daughters are always somehow connected to the ghost
   
10. Physical interaction with a flashback
11. The house will burn during the climax
12. Seances just make ghosts angry
13. Male leads always go crazy
14. Houses don't let you leave
15. The soundtrack theme will always be in a minor key

Honorable mention: Kid always does dark themed drawings in pencil or crayon that the teacher brings to the attention of the mother.

I am about to say something that most will believe to be crazy, in fact, it just might be. Whenever I let my cats outside, I know when they want to come in because I pick up a communication from them psychically, and this psychic communication is not intentional... the cat puts out a mental desire or distress or intention to come inside, and I pick it up and and only notice it because it represents itself as an amplification of whatever sense I happen to be focusing on at the time... for example, if I'm listening to something, the sound will become fuller, a bit louder, and I will recognize the difference in tone and know that is my cat asking to come inside.  This often works even when I don't know he's outside.  I will get the signal, test it by looking and sure enough, every time, there he is waiting to get inside.  Sometimes I will test it it by looking when I don't get the signal, and sure enough, even though he's outside, he's nowhere to be found, and he doesn't come running.  No0w maybe I'm just getting lucky, maybe there's an explanation that is mundane and boring, but perhaps, just perhaps there are things about our senses and how we communicate that we do not quite understand or develop, and this is just one of them.  

Science dictates that all of our senses are limited, that there is so much more out there than we detect, and I have often asserted that like blending primary colors to discover new colors, perhaps blending our senses can have the same result.  I leave this for you to ponder... but perhaps I have discovered one way in which we can communicate with one another, and perhaps our inner world is not merely a place for fantasy and dreams and nightmares and white noise, but an environment for real work, like an underground railroad or workspace, or even a passage, through the Twilight Zone. 

Understanding Back to the Future

Watching the Back to the Future trilogy, it all starts to make sense why Marty has to keep going further back in time. There's a few thematic consistencies that run through the films, but the most important one might be the one about pride. In each film a family member has died because they wouldn't back down, and Marty shows the same stubbornness in each movie as well, and each time it makes things worse, so he has to go further back and discover a family member who died because of pride... remember in part 1 it's his Uncle Joey, in part 2 it's his father, and in part 3 it's someone else in the family... but each film keeps trying to teach him the importance of choosing one's battles, so that in the end the cycle will be broken... I never really paid attention to this imortant morality play that threads through all three movies so well, I wonder what else is going on that I didn't notice before?

My grandmother's very first sculpture called Despair, I have loved it ever since I was a child, I don't know why, t could be the intensity of drawn in emotion, the zazen posture, the stand, the square uniformity, so many things, it's stunning to me though and always has been.