Respect For Personality

As I look back over quite a few decades now, I can see my life as occurring in two periods.  The first was approximately 38 years during which I grew older but not wiser and the next in which i grew older and somewhat wiser.   I progressed through the teen years, went to school, got a job, got married and had kids just like about probably 90% of Americans in today's culture.  Then up jumped the devil.  There was good news and bad news.  The bad news was my wife wanted to divorce.  As it turned out she was right.  I had not made progress toward maturity to justify staying together and curiously enough this impeded her progress toward her goals as well.  But let me get to the good news because this launched a whole new direction to my life.  Slowly, unknowingly but continuously to where I am today.

At that time I became interested in Astrology.  I could erect the horoscope because that was a matter of mathematics and I was skilled at that. That was B.C. (Before Computers that is) But then I didn't know what to do with them... what did they mean? ...how could they be useful?  So my wife told me of a lecture at the local YWCA where there would be a section on astrology and maybe I could get some useful information from that.  And that was the beginning of the good news.  There I met Sara Julian and she told me about the Sabian Assembly (http://www.sabian.org/ and http://www.sabianassembly.org/).  Golly they had books, they had lessons, they had astrologers and they had Marc Edmund Jones.  He was known as the the Dean of  American Astrologers.  I  joined  theSabianAssembly immediately.  That was in 1969 and I have never looked back. It was in the Sabian Assembly that I learned respect for personality...my own as well as others.

The idea of respect for personality is based on everyone's right to determine his own self-justification.
The implication here is that when we are born, we are all born(1) naked and (2) with freedom of choice.  And that is what makes us all equal.  So we are free to develop our own game plan for better or worse.  Or for that matter to operate without a game plan at all.  We have no right to stick our nose into other people's business or help them without being asked and  be put off when it is refused. 

Now I realize that living with this concept was what was missing in the first half of my life.  I made the decisions for my family whether they liked it or not.  And Karma demanded that I lost that family.  Don't get me wrong.   The signals were there.  My wife tried to teach me about choice but I didn't listen.  But in the second period of my life I came slowly to understand the need to accept  this concept.  I raised my children by telling them..."don't help me until I ask".  The result was that now they know what kind of help I need and they are more willing to give it and this makes us partners instead of father and sons.  

 Perhaps all is not lost as I go into my third period in this life.

Please post your comments here rather than on Facebook because Facebook and I are not friendly.  But of course.... you are free to post them anywhere you choose...  hahaha

Thanksgiving and What I am Thankful For

/While I was lying in bed, during that space between darktime and daylight, I reflected on those things that I was thankful for.  Of course I was thankful for good health.  After all I survived 79 winters mostly with only one eye.  Even though I am a tad overweight(Luke says I am obese and should do his power 90) and I have had both my knees replaced and a couple of by-passes, I do  enjoy good health.  Thanks to the Federal Government and the DuPont company I have enough money to make it through this lifetime.  But what I am most thankful for are the women in my life.

My first wife I met when I was still in highschool.  After I finished college we got married and that lasted through graduate school and two children for about 16 years.  I was not ready for the challenges that being a husband and a parent  presented.  So when it was all over I was thankful then that it was amicable as divorces go. 

My second wife and I met in the environs of South Phillie.  We married and that lasted for over 34 years.  Again there were two children and the challenges of being a husband and parent were still huge.  But somehow, this time I was learning to feel comfortable with myself and we had a happy and peaceful life(I can remember only one argument) over those years til she passed on to another existance.

So I can reflect and say to myself that the women in my life, starting with my mother and sister along with an assortment of aunts and cousins, as well as my wives, have made the journey through this world both happy and tolerable.  But the culmination of it all is the woman of my life right now.  It is almost like the heavens have opened up and sent to me a person who fits in every way.  The marriage rituals went from a formal church wedding and celebration to a marriage by the Justice of Peace to now a simple conversation and commitment between two consenting adults.  So now I can say...

     Barbara.. you have made me want to Lie and Steal and Cheat as it was said  at an old Irish wedding...

     I want to Lie by your side til death do us part

     I want to  steal your heart everytime I can

    and I want to cheat death so I can be with you forever....

   
and that is what I am thankful for this Thanksgiving....

What's the matter with Anti-matter?

Well they finally did it.   The large hadron collider in Switzerland has produce significant quantities of anti-matter.  By significant it is meant 32 particles that were kept "alive" for fractions of a second.  But that is a long time in particle physics.  What this anti-matter particle is ... think of a hydrogen atom with a plus charge as regular matter called a proton.  Then a hydrogen atom with a negative charge is called an anti-proton or in other words a positron.  So you can see.. that when a proton and an anti-proton get together they cancel each other out or annihilate with a resulting large release of energy.  The implications of this experiment are huge.

If we are capable of making even more anti-matter than was made in this experiment then we would have unbelievably large amounts of energy at our disposal.  Michio Kaku, who is the developer of String Theory and the host on the Discovery Science channel, has proposed two uses for ainti-matter in his book "Physics of the Impossible".  One is to use the virtually 100% energy release from this process of annihilating matter and anti-matter to produce rocket power to take us to the stars at considerably higher speeds than we can attain with conventional fuels.  And the use of anti-matter to keep wormholes open as a passage to parallel worlds.  After all, we wouldn't want to be going thru a wormhole and have it collapse on us.  Also the ideal passage to a parallet world would include the ability to return to this one if we should choose to do so.

This would also have implications to time travel.  According to Kaku time travel can be accomplished in a number of ways.  (1.) by traveling at speeds close to that of light and by (2.) traveling to other dimensions, other worlds and the like by tunneling thru a wormhole.  As an example if you were able to travel backward in time and like the fly on the wall see how you handled a certain situation.  Then observe other ways to change your attitude back in the future.  You could then operate more successfully in your current reality.  I have talked about how to change your attitude in a previous blog post.

The Web of Time

Time stretches out like a web in all directions.  We can see this from all the expressions about time.  "I didn't have enough time", "too much time on my hands", "time waits for no one", and on and on.

I have found that, lately at least, I have been caught up in the sticky web of time.  There appear to be more things to do than the time to do them.  Does that fit you?  When you are involved in something and seem to be at a crossroad, another "something" comes along that demands your attention and as a result your time.  If you give in then you can find yourself completely enmeshed in the sticky web of time with your eyes rolling looking for that dark spider to crawl out and bite you.

My mentor, Marc Jones, solved that for me one time when I announced that I had so many things to do that I couldn't do anything.  He said...  "...then do nothing".  That puzzled me for awhile until I realized that his statement came right out of "Alice in Wonderland".  And what that meant was that when the situation got tangled in the web of time and space then... step back, reflect.. prioritize perhaps and start back on each one at a time.  This may also be the solution to escaping the minotaur's maze.

Either way enjoy your day and stop to smell the roses.

The Number of the Beast

A while ago I gave a presentation on the relationship between attitude and outcome.  To make a long story short, this relationship is like a pendulum.  If attitude is like the pivot point of a pendulum then outcome is the point at which the bob hangs directly below.  I mean after all they have not repealed the Law of Gravity.  Right?  When we raise the bob away from its rest point we give it potential energy.  And when we release the bob it loses potential energy as it travels back toward its rest point.  This rest point in our little diagram is the zero point and it represents the outcome of our basic attitude.  The bob then proceeds to move upward as it gains kinetic energy until it reaches a height equal to the height at which it was originally released.  So you see, attitude can be both positive and negative.  But that is not the real genius of the discussion,  The most important thing here is that your attitude determines the outcome of whatever you are doing.

Soooooooo if you don't like the outcome of what you have set in motion then change your attitude and try it again but perhaps from a different set of circumstances and most likely with a different outcome.  How do you change your attitude?  We have discussed this many times over the weeks of these blogs.  Visualization.  Visualize a positive outcome.  How would it look like when you achieve the thing you wished for.  How would you feel.   Create your own reality.  Constant reminders to stimulate the senses.  All of them that apply.  After all it is the brain that receives these inputs and processes them and gives meaning and value to your reality.

As a by-product of the thoughts that went into this post, let me share something I was puzzled about in the biblical literature for years.  In "Revelations" the number of the beast is given as 666.
Ancient mathematics was stuck at the point of only being used for accounting purposes.  This was because there was no concept of zero and no philosophical meaning for positive and negative. The number adds up to 6+6+6 = 18 and  18 reduces to 9... and the nine reduces to zero by the technique of casting out of nines.  The literature says...

And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.


and that sounds to me like someone who knew his math, knew his philosophy and knew what he was doing.