Monthly Archives: July 2009

God’s Will

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If there is ever any doubt about God’s will and you, a Google search or going the wordpress blogs will clear it up – not. There are hundreds of posts daily proclaiming what exactly God’s will is from a hundred different perspectives. I find it shocking how God’s will is so well known by thousands of different people, almost like they have a direct line to God.

This idea of one person knowing what God’s will is for each and every individual is pure fantasy. God’s will, does not exist in any manner as far as we humans are concerned. We are free to choose and to do whatever we wish as God stands by and watches.

If God preferred us to be clones, this post would not happen. Those who proclaim to have the inside track of God’s will, would not be proclaiming, as there would be nothing to proclaim. We would be living Gods will, and not thinking there was anything else.

G willCan we possibly know what God’s will really is, or even if it is? There is no written disinterested authority that can be called to account to further define what comprises God’s will. Worse yet, what is written about God’s will is very subjective and modified however one chooses to define it. It is common where one first decides what God’s will is, and then finds written proof to substantiate their position.

It is a silly thought, believing anyone can think on God’s level. Using a single phrase, series of separated phrases, or a complete paragraph from two thousand years ago, from a land and culture we do not really understand. You may as well get in your time machine, travel back a few millennia and tell people to start lighting their fires with a cigarette lighter. This would be just as clear to them, as their thinking is to us now.

There is an easy, foolproof way to understand how well your life and God’s purpose for your life mesh together. There are undeniable proofs everyone has access to, which we have always been aware of. Better than pretending to believe in some words written on paper that we really do not understand, we can know for certain what we are to do with our life and how we are to live.

Set aside quiet time, every day if you can, where your thoughts will not be intruded upon. I am suggesting meditation, or relaxation. If you really want to have a glimmer of God, you need a clear head. Let your mind wander and see where your wanderings take you. Observe at your thoughts without judging them or wondering if they are important enough. Let your thoughts flow where and as they will.

Depending on your spiritual state – which is highly influenced by your emotional and physical state – you will eventually start reflecting on how you are living your life. This is where you begin to learn what your life purpose is and how it fits into God’s purpose for you. As your mind wanders over what you are doing with your life, you will become aware, if you reserve judgment and opinion, exactly how and how you are not leading a life God would prefer you live.

Whether this is God speaking to you, reminding you, or directing your thoughts, this is where you may learn what you should be doing with your life. For some, the knowledge coming from unbiased observation is too great, and they refuse to acknowledge what they now know to be true. For others, they feel like they have touched the face and heart of God and change their life accordingly. For most of us, we land somewhere in between.

Only you can then choose to follow your path. You can continue rebel, and disobey what your heart knows is right, and that is okay too. The choice is yours. Like Pandora’s Box, once you know the difference between the life you lead and the life you should lead, the responsibility of your actions are on you. Choose wisely. Of course you can go on deliberating and questioning, pretending to not have the answers you need.

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Fishing On The Cheap

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Many people find fishing a fun and peaceful pastime, a place to get away from it all, and enjoy nature. For the more driven fisherman it is a high skill, high stress competitive sport. Most fishermen however are out having fun at the closest fishing body of water they can catch fish in.

As the range of people fishing ranges from one end of the spectrum to the other, so does fishing tackle. People fish with everything from a spool of fishing line with a weight and hook attached, to tens of thousands dollars of equipment including a boat, sonar, mapping equipment, and high dollar fishing rods and reels. Not to mention at least one hundred dollar plus net to get their fish from the water into the boat with a camera or two to record it all.

20 year old Zebco rod and reel in action

20 year old Zebco rod and reel in action

Carp fishing can be as simple and inexpensive, or as complex and expensive as a person chooses to make it. I prefer the simple and inexpensive end of the scale. I do not tie up a lot of money in any of my Carp fishing equipment. Though half the family thinks, one float tube, two kayaks, and a dozen rods and reels are a little excessive to catch fish I do not even eat. In my case the tube, kayaks, rods, and reels make fishing more fun, not more expensive and are shared by the family too.

Starting with rods and reels, Carp and fish in general do not care whether you have a ten dollar garage sale outfit, or a balanced rod and reel from a premiere rod maker. What matters is having a Carp put your bait in its mouth. A surprising number of very large fish are caught and landed by small children on their favorite cartoon character fishing rod selling for under twenty dollars. Big fish on cheap equipment is not the norm, but it happens more than expensive tackle makers want you to believe.

I have two main rods and reels I use most often. One is a Carp rod and reel, the second is a spinning rod and a spin cast reel which are not made for each other, but they work, and satisfy my requirement for inexpensive rods and reels.

My spinning rod is made for a reel that hangs down, but my spinning reel gave out. My twenty year old Zebco spincast reel, which is stil working as well as new, is made to sit on top of a rod, but the rod broke. A spincast rod has a horn, almost like a trigger, where you place your index finger. It gives you added control and helps you hang on to your rod when a big Carp is on the line. The correct rod for the reel was broken by a feisty Carp, or maybe old age and a big carp. The reel is now pushing twenty years old. This awkward system works for me, and is cheaper than buying another rod or reel.

For fishing line, how strong a line you need depends on where you are fishing. Fishing where there are no rocks, logs, or other debris on the bottom, an ultra light outfit, perhaps even four pound test if fine for most Carp fishing. Generally though you want a rod and reel with at least an eight pound test line. Your rod should list the proper line strength, and the reel may have a recommendation too. If you are fishing around rocks and brush, you may need a much stronger line and heavier duty rod and reel. Of course if heavy duty is all you have it is fine too.

When I use my spinning rod and spin cast reel, I tie a light cord to my fishing rod. Because most reels have an always on drag and once a Carp hooks itself and panics if the rod is not tied to something it is in the lake and out of sight and reach. Fortunately over the years, I have only lost two rods and reels. I have seen more disappear when people I was fishing with where not paying attention to their rod.

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Health For Hire Potential Medical Income Stream

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Living in a capitalistic society at times seems as if it is the responsibility of everyone else to help others part with their money, in a way that is a benefit to themselves. Capitalism has intruded into personal areas of life. In nature and in old primitive societies of the past, some African, and Eskimo cultures as an example, when someone became old and felt they were of no use, or a burden to the family, the elderly or the family took care of the situation.

In Africa, an old sick person would be taken outside of the village at dusk and left. In the northern tiers where Eskimos lived they were pulled out on the ice a long way from the village and left. I am sure every society around the world had a system that worked for them. Whether it was cruel or violates the importance of human life, it was how things were done.

healthToday I see an artificial value on human life prompted by greed. Medicine has progressed to a point where if you have health insurance doctors can fend off heart disease and other potentially quick death diseases. What this does is keep someone alive as the odds of developing cancer become an increasing possibility.

I don’t know if it holds true any longer, but I read the odds of developing cancer go up one-hundred percent each year after the age of seventy. Cancer by its nature is expensive to treat. Many insurance plans require individual financial participation on top of the premiums paid monthly. If the going rate is perhaps twenty percent of the cost, the cost of cancer treatment could cost one individual tens of thousands of dollars.

Arriving at the age of retirement, cancer is a growing concern added on to other health concerns. Diabetes and high blood pressure appear as prevalent health issues starting around middle age. So what does this have to do with capitalism? The cost of living as long as possible has everything to do with capitalism.

It seems medicine has moved away from, or perhaps never really was well rooted in, a deep need to help fellow humans. The cost of becoming a doctor, and practicing medicine, to include use of hospitals, and belonging to HMO’s has made the cost of receiving medical care so incredibly expensive, doctors are now as much accountants as they are practitioners of medicine.

Colleges of medicine, hospitals, doctors, and HMO’s, medical equipment makers all make a profit. Not profit to live on, but as large a profit as the receiver of their wares will bear. The business of medicine has no primary goal of curing you. The new medical business model revolves around making you a patient as early in your life as possible for as long as possible.

This focus on your current health is about your future worth. If, or recently when you are diagnosed having Type II Diabetes, or a heart or artery condition, emphasis is placed on your prescribed medications. Other health promoting choices are almost an afterthought. Serious diet help is for the most part window dressing. You are now an income stream for the business of medicine. The whole system would collapse if you opted out, or recovered to the point where you did not require frequent doctor visits with expensive tests, etc. In other words more of your income spent on your health each year.

Some medicines being touted in commercials, have possible side effects much worse than the disease; if any side effects occur, a new income stream is created by your [now] more serious health condition. Once you are depleted of your liquid assets, the cost of keeping you alive moves on to the state. The state at times has very deep pockets which capitalistic medicine takes advantage of.

This is my perspective and opinion, of course, and you are free to disagree. I feel we have been coerced, or maybe influenced that our life regardless of the quality of that life and the financial consequence does not matter. There comes a time towards the end of life when the cure is not worth the price of admission.

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New World Order is Big Business as Usual

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I was reading some fascinating ideas about our future. It is nothing new that there are secret groups of powerful people working towards a global government, global economy, and global food supply. I suppose it is nothing new about any global businesses as they have been around for some years now. Businesses that have their roots in many countries and their reach goes into many diverse areas.

The most recent, or possibly the first real global business model I have noticed is the business of South Korea. Without going into detail about how South Korea is doing it, they are becoming a diversified company reaching into many facets of our daily life no matter where we live or what we do. Of course there are nay sayers who think the Korean manufacturing machine may fall on its face, and be gone in the wink of an eye.

Looking a little south of Korea is mighty Japan, who has mega businesses in place who are very successful. Companies such as Toyota, who may be owned by a larger company, or in itself owns many smaller companies. Changing direction is Nike, who has gone from a floundering second rate shoe company into a company who not only provides shoes for the world, but clothing and other branded products as well.

Nothing new so far in what I have written. Anyone who sits down for ten minutes thinking about huge companies will understand the same things. What about the long range though? I have no doubt, watching McDonalds moving into the Coffee boutique business, Dunkin’ Doughnuts selling coffee through grocery stores, Phillip Morris quietly moving out of the cigarette business, what else is going on in the big business world that you and I are not aware of?

reality slidingHow many companies have fifty or one hundred year business plans that melt, solidify, but always change as the decades roll on. Will we a century from now be buying our goods from one of a few hundred mega companies who will be selling everything from wheat and rice to electronics, and energy? Is there a new world order lurking out there on the horizon waiting to launch a new government and a new economy?

I doubt a new world order as world government is a possibility as far as my vision carries me. I think there may come a time when almost everyone in the world will be working for a behemoth of a company that produces and sells everything from mops and brooms to state of the art luxury items. I see a time in the future when business will be the world government. What I find ironic is everything is in place and people are being trained to not only accept the idea, but welcome it.

You are reading this right now because you own a computer and purchased a connection to the internet. Some company, a very large company provides you and me, and a large part of the country where you live with this same access. They try to make it as convenient as possible to never have to leave their home page.

Watch the local news each night at dinner time and monitor news on more than one station. You will notice the news is almost identical. Mega portals such as Yahoo, MSN, network news, and your local news feed off each other. News papers and news magazines follow suit. Giant network news is vanilla flavored pudding. Watch all ‘world news’ programs and see how similar they are. They all may be a story or two apart in what they report, with their biggest difference in the order and the potential story slant.

But that only scratches the surface. What really is important is what online role playing games have in common. To be the successful in an online game you have to join a guild, or something like it under a different name. A guild is a loose group of people who have skills that are needed by the group as a whole. The more diverse and needed are the skills, the more powerful the guild becomes. The more powerful the guild becomes the more it can collectively accomplish.

Something interesting about our brains to think about. Our brains do a poor job of separating reality and fantasy. Whether we dream it, daydream it, play it, or live it, it makes no difference to our brains. Belonging to a guild in a fantasy game is no different than being an employee at a mega company.

Being an employee at a mega company, is not much different than joining a new type of political party. Joining a new political party is not really that odd. Millions and millions of gamers out there, slowly having their idea of what is acceptable and what is not modified each hour they play gaining levels or status in their alternate life inside their online game. Then they go into the real world, or do they?

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Spirituality, Your Ignored Other Half

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How great it would have been if through my life someone would have been there to teach me spiritual development. Not to be confused with religious education, or indoctrination if that is how you see it, but rather an age based life mentoring, showing my spiritual growth and possibilities.

That is not to say I would change any of my choices through my life. Generally, the only semi real attention concerns state of spirit from a religious perspective. It is possible that some religions are more holistic in their approach, but I have yet to encounter one at close range that is.

spiritual selfAuthority figures in our life do what they can to raise us to know right from wrong and how to stay out of trouble. Their purpose generally is to make life easier for themselves rather than for our own good, excepting parents and other close family.

We are also led into achieving a certain level of achievement in our educational curriculum. What that level of achievement is for us varies from person to person and individual life circumstance, but generally we are expected to start making our own way as best we can once we reach a certain age, or achieve a certain level of educational mastery.

In all of this, with all our adult keepers, and societies watchful eye promoting acceptable behavior, no one really cares about our spiritual life. Most families, do not have spirituality hour, and there is not time set aside in the classroom where children are shown their life from a spiritual perspective.

Wouldn’t it have been wonderful to receive spiritual training throughout our life up to this moment? Having a mentor, or many mentors explaining to us with words and ideas that we understand, what our basic human purpose is and why it is important we nurture our spiritual self.

We would not wake up one day as an adult after a period lasting from weeks to decades of never feeling really comfortable with who we are and not knowing how to fix it. When we do come out of  our self absorbed life looking around as if for the first time, noticing something serious is lacking, we generally do not know what it is, or why we feel how we feel.

Right now, this instant wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to ask our spiritual adviser why we feel the way we do? I believe as children when we are not shy about asking questions, we are too busy learning about our world to think about our spiritual self. Along the way our spiritual self is hidden from us.

As adults we have a self imposed rule about admitting we do not know, and asking others what they think. That is with the exception of asking our closest friends who are our closest friends because they are almost just like us, or as close as we can find.

Spiritual development does not have to be a process of rebellion against everything you believe, were taught, or think is possible. What your spiritual development should be is learning how you live your life so you recognize the face in the mirror as yourself. You do not want someone acting as you, as you peek out from behind deciding what kind of job they are doing for you.

When I was a child someone told me never to marry an actor, because you could never be certain if they were being real or acting. I have come to realize that it applies to each of us. Being yourself is the best gift you can give to you. Being yourself you may not know where you are headed with any certainty, but you can take comfort in knowing it is you and not some shell living your life for you on the trip.

I am still learning about my spiritual self, and I imagine I will for a long time. I urge you not to wait until you see your end out on the horizon to start filling in the blanks about what your purpose to being alive is and the amazing power of your spiritual self. Start learning about your spiritual side of you now, so you enjoy the trip instead of an unhappy spectator in your life.

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