Welcome, ven a gozar!

New age, paranormal, or occult as it is known comes and goes, cycling through our lives, much like our taste in books, movies, and food. Everything has its season and the paranormal is no exception. Every generation has some people who want to be known as discovering some new or long lost knowledge. Bad news, there is no new knowledge when it comes to certain subjects, only knowledge that has not been passed on for any number of reasons.

It certainly is funny to listen to people talk about any experiences they may have had with something they do not know how to explain. If they are not scared someone in the group they are talking to probably is. I have trouble with the fear part as it is self generated fear and really has no basis in a rational thought process. If someone who is a Christian calls upon God, or asks to have angels sent to complete a task, and it happened no one would blink an eye.

We seem to think that God just sits wherever God sits and waits for us to command something. We think for any number that this thought is completely rational and viable. We pray, implore, beg, or command, and God of course complies with our request. We have this thought so ingrained into our psyche, that in a prayer circle,  if a number of Angels showed up and told the group they were going to do what was asked, most of the group would be nonplussed. After all that is how religion works.

Take the same group of people and put them in a new environment and let them hear, say scratching on a door from a room they know no one is in and panic erupts with fear coming a close second. If someone experiences something that does not fit into their idea of life, it must be the work of some unknown evil entity. There is no room in most peoples thinking that allows for something to exist that is neither there to help nor hinder, but it must always be one or the other.

The more rational people of times passed understood that not everything in the world of the unseen was either good or evil from their personal perspective, but in our fast paced life where we file and catalogue everything we have lost most categories of anything past the first two. Those two categories being either good for us or bad for us. We have not left room for very much in between those two places.

Most people over the course of a lifetime experience something occult or paranormal. Whether it is a ghost, noises, vision, or visitation, very few people are immune from the paranormal. A few people will have many such experiences, and most of them come to understand and accept there is a lot in the world that they know very little about.

In most cases when you find yourself in a position of experiencing something you have never experienced before, the first thing to remember is not to panic or get scared. Once panic or fear rules, rational thought goes out the window. Once rational thought goes out the window, you are no longer in charge of yourself. Once you are no longer in charge of yourself, you have opened a door that you may prefer remain closed.

Try to remember to not to jump from an adult orientation to a child mindset. You need the adult part of yourself active and functioning. Keep calm, and observe whatever is happening. In scary movies people become frightened of the silliest things. It could be something as inane as a glass sliding, or a picture moving, or something floating. Really what is so scary about those things other than you have never experienced them before?

If you feel you can not control your emotions, then pray. It does not matter what you pray about as prayer has a calming effect on us. If praying is not part of your makeup, simply downplaying whatever is happening, and focusing on something else has the same effect.

One more thought to remember, probably the most important idea, one which you have been told since you were a child and have forgotten is this. Anything you experience can not harm you in any way unless you give it permission to (let it). A feeling of something unseen touching your shoulder is just a touch, no more, no less. There is no reason to lose control of yourself over the situation because there is nothing you can do about being touched, it is already in the past.

Now that I have your attention I want to mention in passing that the above ideas work just as well in our everyday lives too. Stay within yourself, and do not get rattled every time something changes in your world that you do not like and probably can not control. Nothing stays the same, and never has. Change what you can, and let the rest take care of itself.

I was reading some online threads this morning about an actor who is also a Scientologist. There was an article about him and his then new found religion, and then the many comments that followed. I read the words fanatic, lunatic, and some other rather colorful descriptions of this person’s conversion to a belief system that makes sense to them.

I read a book put out by the founder of Scientology a number of years ago, and I have to admit, at the time it did not make a lot of sense and appeared to be a lot of smoke and mirrors. That being said, the belief system was already established, and my opinion of it accounts for little, as it still does.

Perhaps if I reread the book now, I am sure I would have a different viewpoint of Scientology. As I have learned over the years, the world is not always what it seems once you scratch the surface and actually look at what is going on, instead of ‘knowing’ what is going on in the world. Things are quite a bit different when one takes the time to observe what they see rather than simply placing what they think they saw into what they believe to be true.

Back to Scientology, I fail to see why there are so many strong feelings about this belief system? I thought maybe it was the name, Scientology, which I do not think you can find many people who would say Scientology sounds religious. So the word, Scientology does not sound very religious in nature so people could be upset about someone believing in something that does not sound religious. People have attacked other people both verbally and physically over a lot less.

Scientology sounds really foreign, way beyond some of those vague eastern religions. I think those ‘vague’ eastern religions are more tolerated because they have been around for a while, and were not invented within the last fifty years or so. This makes them more established, and possibly more acceptable because someone did not just invent them.

In defense of Scientology itself, a belief system sometimes takes on a life of its own. We grow up and are told what to believe and how to perform whatever rituals come with that belief system. When we grow older and realize there are other ways of perceiving in respect to a belief system other than what we were taught. If we are open to possibility it becomes obvious that most other belief systems have the same end goal in mind that our belief system does. Other belief systems simply they just go about arriving at the same end differently. This usually happens because they come from a culture different from ours and they have a different way of viewing the world.

Then there is the question of the actor himself. We determined a long time ago that people have the right to believe as they deem proper for themselves. That does not mean that someone can only have a belief system that meets within the narrow scope of approval of another person’s idea of what is a proper belief system.

People are free to believe what they want as long as it does no harm to others. If Scientology is a person’s belief system, we have no right, and we should have no public opinion on whether it meets our own standards or not. That is not something we as individuals have the right to decide for other people. As the popular saying goes, or at least as well as I remember it, “I don’t have to agree with your beliefs, but I will defend them to te death.

Though it does seem on a physical level that here is some women with absolutely no self worth or self esteem being kept as a pet by one or many men over a period of time, spiritual thinking can see the relationship as something else. From a spiritual point of view these relationships can be thought of as quite dynamic. It can even be said that these relationships are an example of love at its highest representation.

If you accept as a basic concept that we are here on this earth to learn and become better human beings, these relationships are not terrible, and there is no exploitation. It takes is a rethinking of what we see from a physical to a spiritual process. For many people it is too big of a jump, and their minds can not accept that something horrible is being done as an act of unconditional love and growth for another.

I think this is true, and relationships like these are an obvious example. I think that growth and high level love are shown in many horrible things that take place in this world daily. Going back to the idea that we are here on this earth to learn and grow spiritually, who is it we are learning from? There is no supreme being that takes us by the hand and leads us through our life, and shows us what we need to know, and we understand the learning, and are grateful for the instruction.

We humans do not operate like that. We humans learn by making our own mistakes and committing our own crimes. For example, there is a savage murder yesterday. It is a terrible thing and the killer should be banished to prison for life, or executed as soon as possible.

This is the physical side of our thinking in action. What we do not think about is the spiritual side of what occurred. What about the victim, what did they learn from this experience? There is nothing obvious for the victim. Probably because of circumstances, or bad judgement they died a horrible needless death.

What about the possibility that they lived their life for this moment to happen, to willingly be the victim for the killer? While this thought is shocking and perhaps revolting, it can be seen as a possibility on a spiritual level.

The killer in this heinous crime needed to learn something from the killing. Why should someone who is here on this earth on their own journey, be randomly murdered, halting their path of learning and spiritual growth? There does not seem to be any balance or justice in this thought.

What about the possibility that these people agree to be in these positions for the sole purpose of being the victim out of love for the person(s) who need(s) to learn from this experience? While agreeing to be a victim, and be abused, tortured, or murdered is disgusting and repulsive on a physical plane, on a spiritual plane, it is an example of love on the highest level.

What more could a spiritual being do than volunteer to be a victim for another beings spiritual growth? Again the idea is repulsive, but history is full of people who have chosen to be a victim rather than allow another innocent person to be a victim. The most recent example to me is the holocaust. Many, many known and unknown people stepped up in place of another knowing full well what the consequences would be for them. Yet they did it anyway in an act of supreme love.

From that perspective, is the idea of one person living their life until some predetermined moment when they are to be a victim unreasonable? I do not think so at all. In a realm where everything is supposedly perfect, no matter how unjust it appears on the surface, it makes complete sense. Many of the worlds religions are of the belief that everything that happens is the will of God. The idea of a human being agreeing to be born to be a victim of another on the physical plane, is nothing different than Gods will being done on a spiritual level.

This post and the one following is a two part post. You may find them, unsettling, disagreeable sick, or revolting. If you are not open to thinking from a new perspective, I suggest you skip these next two posts. Thank you.

From time to time I have been at social functions, where I see young women who I know are being exploited. They are willingly sitting in a chair ignored for hours at a time. The man shows up or summons them to him for something. That is their life purpose by all appearances, to be totally dependent on one man in a one way relationship.

It is not obvious unless you understand the type of man they are with. I imagine they are everywhere, but to me they are only visible when it is a social gathering of some type. These are men who think the whole world serves only them, and that is how they live their life. Perhaps they are sociopaths to some degree, or maybe something different, but their views on how the world works, are far from normal.

The women are usually young and of course pretty, who are not in the rocket science league of brain power, but I am sure they are smart enough to do something different with their lives if they made the effort. I am not sure how the process works, but it must start at home when they are children. They are somehow turned into possessions instead of human beings by their fathers I think, or so it appears.

So they grow up and graduate high school, and maybe try out college, or living on their own. But it is not easy for them as they are used to being Daddy’s pet, and they miss that life. All they had to do was be cute for Daddy, and make him laugh, and everything else was okay. Daddy took care of their survival needs and that is all they needed

When these women are out on their own, perhaps before, male predators know them as soon as they see them. That is what some men specialize in, finding these women. They know some Daddy’s raise their little girls like this, probably because they were raised in the same type of environment. They spot these young women, and start working on them almost before they have lived on their own in the adult world.

So here is young woman, some toy a certain type of man picked up, and can afford right now. As long as she doesn’t act too stupid, or start thinking she is important, she will be what most people think of as a kept woman. She will have clothes and things, and she will get her own, cell phone, car, and probably spending money. This is not a Sugar Daddy relationship, because the woman is not out on her own and living in her own place. She is totally dependent on a man taking care of her.

The worst part of it in my opinion is that these women, and their men see this type of relationship as totally normal. If you try to tell them how abnormal the situation is, they will look at you like you are talking in a language they have never heard of before.

Of course the time comes, when he starts thinking she is not quite what he wants, perhaps he wanted her to do his bidding once or twice and she was not home, or she is spending money a little too fast, or maybe her mouth is getting a little smart for his liking. It could be as simple as she is starting to get boring to him. At any rate, sooner or later he will get tired of her and throw her out, or give to one of his friends as a pet.

I am not sure what happens to these women as grow into middle age, but I imagine that life does not improve for most of them. There is an alternate spiritual view I have been introduced to over the years, and it paints a whole new paradigm of what is happening in these relationships.

Part two tomorrow.

It is something the way some people approach their belief system. Some people go to such extremes after changing, and nothing changes in their life. It does not seem to matter to them though. They think if they wait a little longer, they will be rewarded.

What I see they end up having is a blame system. They decide what their life should be like. They make an attempt at being the new them. When it does not work out they try it all over again. After a number of tries they start accusing, and blaming, because they are not rewarded as they feel they should be. It is a new version of the, “Emperor’s New Clothes”, only in this story the Emperor does not walk around naked. The Emperor in this version of the story had his clothes washed, and given back to him.

Unfortunately, the new laundry service that washed the Emperor’s clothes made a mistake, and the clothes no longer look to be the same clothes the Emperor sent off to be cleaned. The laundry used some new cleaning product, and a new sequence of cleaning the clothes. What happened is the clothes are not the same texture, and colors not what they were before they were washed.

The clothes feel different to the Emperor because they have new texture, and colors, so the Emperor assumes they are new clothes. What the Emperor misses in this thinking is about the clothes themselves. If they were indeed different clothes than the Emperor sent to the laundry, that would mean someone else received the Emperor’s clothes, and the Emperor received their clothes. Because the Emperor thinks these clothes are better than the old clothes, there is no need to change anything - as the laundry made the mistake. The mistake seems to be in the Emperor’s favor, so of course the Emperor is quiet about the switch.

The laundry does not have the dilemma they thought they would, because so far everyone thinks the clothes they wear now are better than the clothes they sent in for cleaning! So the laundry, other than have some anxiety over who may complain about their clothes, has no real problem at the moment.

Now the Emperor has been wearing his new clothes for a while. While the Emperor likes the new color and texture of the clothes, it seems something is not quite right with the clothes. The Emperor was sure that these new clothes were special, and as soon as they were put on, everything would start changing in the Emperor’s life.

Sadly, for the Emperor, there has been very little change except for the few days of vibrant enthusiasm of wearing new clothes and feeling pretty good about it. The Emperor notices little by little the major life change he is expecting is not happening! The Emperor can not understand what is wrong, and starts to get a little disgruntled.

The Emperor talks to some of his new friends who think they have also received the new clothes. They all seem happy, upbeat, and on a new path in life. Maybe their life has changed, and maybe it has not changed all they pretend it has, but it makes the Emperor angry thinking he is missing out.

There is no belief system I know of that is built around the idea of an all powerful being who waves a magic wand over new converts, and changes their world because they changed their clothes. If there were any instant payoff belief system, you can believe the whole world would be there already. But there is not one anywhere here…changing your clothes does not change your life.

If you wait for some all powerful being to come and make your life better, because you decided to think differently, I hope you have a comfortable spot to sit and wait, because it won’t be happening in this lifetime, in this reality. That is the stuff fairy tales are made of, and the best we can do is read about them.

I have learned in my life - if I want positive life changes: I have to be active in the process; today is a good day to start; blaming my belief system does not change anything.

I had a bag of fetishes, some of which I wanted to sell. I went out into to the desert where I knew a fetish buyer lived who may be interested in buying the fetishes. I drove for a few hours into the desert. When I arrived I had to go down a small slope, to where the family were living. The wife spotted me first and called out to the husband who was not in sight. She was agitated, and spoke louder than needed, like someone does who is surprised or nervous.

She told me to take a seat by a large flat rock and wait which I did, she did not speak in english, but I understood by her gestures. When the husband showed up he had a very wide face, and wild hair down to his shoulders. He was dressed in flannel and buckskin. He had the look of someone who spent a lot of time in the sun, but his face was not visible.

He had some small Cowrie seashells, or something that looked like Brazil nuts threaded in his hair hanging down over the front of his face. These shells or stones covered most of his face except one eye or the other, depending on which way he tilted his head. He looked like he had some sort of deformity. On his face there were two or three large tentacle like things under his skin. Like the octopus guy in the movie, only less of it and sideways, starting on each cheek and going across his face.

He was both friendly and pleasant, and asked what I was there for? I said to sell some fetishes. He repeated what I said to his wife to his wife. He asked what fetishes, and I poured out the bag on the rock surface. I set a stone lizard, and two long bones to the side, along with some stone carved animals. I showed him the very small fetishes I wanted to sell. They were the size of a finger nail tall, and were made out of some white and red type of rock. They were of people, never less than two and never more than four. They seemed to be struggling against something - maybe strong wind, by the way they were carved. I also had one small fish made out of brown stone, and some other small figures made of brown stone.

He looked at a few of the white fetishes, and told me they were finished roughly. He kept glancing towards my lizard, and I knew he was interested in it but never mentioned it. He took out a cigarette lighter shaped fetish made of antler. It had a rooster on the top. He showed me the carving on the sides, and told me it took him two years to make it. He put it away in his jacket, and told me really it was his son who sold and bought fetishes.

He called the boy and the boy showed up and sat by the rock. The boy was about five or six and had the same disfigurement as the father, but did not have anything covering his face. As the father and I talked about the fetishes, the son started playing around, either losing patience or having too much energy.

The man told the boy I was there to sell fetishes in whatever language they spoke, and showed the boy some of the fetishes, the pieces of two and three people. The boy kept playing around. The man mentioned the fetishes that were still a little rough. He said they were times in my life. I did not realize this and decided maybe I should not be trading them away.

The man then told me that the boy had no fetishes to sell, and apparently was not interested in the fetishes I had to sell. Then he looked at the lizard, and bones again. I realized he was very interested in the lizard and the bones. The boy was not interested in my other fetishes, so I placed them all back in the bag, thanked them, and left. I walked back up the hill, and started walking back to where I had come from.

Somewhere along the way I woke up….

I have thought we are reincarnated since I was a kid. There is just too much evidence including the Christian bible to think it is not a fact that we lived before, and we will live again. Unless someone is a practicing atheist and not a Christian hater in drag, it is rare to find too many major religions that do not have some kind of after life programming in their faith.

Along with reincarnation comes karma, they kind of slide across the horizon as a matched pair. Some people may reject the idea of reincarnation, but they hold onto karma. I read an interesting thought on karma a few years back, I wish I had the source so I could cite it.

The person who wrote it, was thinking about Christianity, reincarnation, and karma. They arrived at the idea that karma was visited upon us over the next three incarnations where we would reap what we had previously sown. After I thought about this, it was a pretty sobering thought. What if I was reaping in this life those things I sown in a recent past life? Whoa, serious stuff. I had to think about those possibilities for a number of days.

Of course after slicing, dicing, and deciding it may be a possibility Then there was the small matter of where does it fit into my own belief system? I found a place for it, and I thought I was done with it.  In the middle of one night, I woke up and felt like I had enough sleep. The only problem was there were still over three hours until the alarm went off.

I lay there, and my mind starting churning ideas like they tend to do when we can not sleep. What pops up except the recent thinking I did about reincarnation? One of the scariest or most exciting idea that came out of this late night thinking about this line of thinking about reincarnation is the later reaping of what you sow now portion.

I woke up with the alarm that morning thinking, as I did believing we are reincarnated or at the very least never die, I myself am reaping that which I planted was a pretty sobering thought. My mind was churning thinking about all those things which I have done with my life up until this moment, both good and bad. That brought me to an old Omni Magazine story I remembered where a man lived his life so neutrally that it was taking him hundreds of years to balance the good and the bad of his life.

What do I have to look forward to I wondered? Where was the list of the good verses the not so good I have done through out my lifetime? Of course our minds have a pretty skewed version of remembering things that comprise our life, so it really was a futile task to try. How could I wonder how my life would be weighed, when I saw it though colored glasses of my own making?

I started, over the next few days treating people differently than I had done up to that point. I payed attention to the idea that they were people and their life was no better nor worse than mine, but the were entitled to the same respect and care from me, that I give to myself. Once again that may not be saying much, because of the glasses we wear of our own making…

After some amount of time, the idea became second nature, as I had been living it most of my life, in my adaptation of the golden rule.  This was the golden rule with a twist though. A long reaching twist at that. Whether true or not, it has I suppose made me a more aware person, if not a better person. Once something is introduced as an idea, whether we accept it or reject it, it is always there, floating though our mind waiting to be recalled at the most inopportune time, like the middle of the night. I suppose on balance, a thought in the night is a lot better than the thief in the night.

I was reading where someone was questioning about what if anything was going to happen in 2012? Some of the people had some rather colorful ideas of what the world was going to change into, and others thought everything would be about the same as it is now. On another web page, I read a short blip  where some younger people decided they were Indigo children because they share some personality traits that these special people are supposedly endowed with.

When I read of people writing these things I always ask myself do they even think? I mean, do they take ten seconds, and say to themselves, ‘I have this feeling, or this description fits me, does it sound resaonable?’ I am skipping right past the words real, and logical, and stopping at reasonable, because that is all the farther these thoughts need to be taken.

Looking at my own birthdays, or whatever important days I decide to mark on my calendar is a a good starting place to make my point about 2012. When my birthday rolls around I am not immediately a year older. The process does not happen because of a date on a calendar. Here is how a birthday year really happens. You mark a birthday on your calendar the day it occurs. For the next six months (approximately) you are closer to whatever age that your birthday was than you are to your next birthday. For the six months following that day or, the remaining six months until your next birthday, you move closer to the age you will be on the day you marked on your calendar.

For example, when I was twenty years old, and waiting for twenty-one years to happen, time did not happen in a vacuum. From the day of my twentieth birthday to six months later I am closer to twenty years old than I am to twenty-one years old. From six months and one day until the calendar day of my twenty first birthday, I am closer to twenty-one than I am to twenty years old.

For those who are excited about what is going to happen in 2012, it needs to be thought of the same way. The way the actual calendar in question was made, consists of periods or cycles of five hundred years. So by remembering from the birthday explanation, the effects of 2012 are already here. They actually started over two hundred years ago,and will continue for another two hundred and fifty some years until we are through the middle of this upcoming cycle and start moving towards the next one.

As to the Indigo children, they are the same idea, but a little different. I mentioned in one of my past posts, about Indigo children first being invented over one hundred years ago. To start with the personality traits of these children who are to usher in the new world that will operate on a higher frequency leave something, imo, to be desired. The personalities of these allegedly advanced children sound more like members of a motor cycle gang, than they do of a higher form of human life.

Dismissing my personal feelings, the Indigo child was invented by one person in the 1800’s who definately had an agenda for the world. Somewhere along the line that agenda was tied in with the Aztec calendar, and the Egyption pyramids. Putting this into perspective, there is no more evidence to support the changing of the world in the year 2012 than there is of the Christian version world ending in three minutes. If you think you think you know one of these Indigo children, think about how many of these children the world has produced in the last two hundred years alone. There is nothing special about them that has not been present in some children of every generation before ours for hundreds of generations.

If you are still not convinced, let’s think about right now, today, and global warming. Pretend for a moment Global Warming is real. The two biggest causes that we can do something about are cattle, and automobiles. If starting tomorrow, we took the keys and batteries from every car, and slaughtered every cow in the world, would global warming go away? Possibly the speed at which global warming happens may slow, but it will not go away just like that. If global warming will not go away, why is it more likely these other things will happen?

I knew a man a number of years ago. We were not friends, or even formal acquaintances. I knew him from where he worked and he new me as a casual customer. That is about as close as the relationship ever went. We had different views on life, so we lived in different circles. Well that is not really true but, it’s not quite not true either.

In his world, he had problems. Or maybe a better definition is psychological problems. He heard voices, and it used to scare him. I know people who hear voices all the time. I occasionally hear voices once in a while, and I never really think much about it.

When I was a child, my father told me once day, that there was a little man that sat on my shoulder. He would always tell me what was right, and what was wrong, and all I had to do was listen. That took care of any fear of voices I had in my life. Heck, if you can have a little man on your shoulder talking to you, why not a woman, little girl, or space creature? I was young enough not to read very much into what he told me, so voices were okay.

But this poor guy was scared of the voices he heard. They never told him anything bad that I knew of, though I have no idea what the voices told him. But I lived through voices second hand a number of times, and a few of my own from time to time, so I did not think much of it. For most of the people that knew him, it was so terrible he could see it written in practically any face he cared to look at.

He went away. I did not know to where until he came back. He committed himself because of the voices he heard. This is a key thought, because some people in his condition assume they are normal. It is a catch twenty-two from the movie, in action for him. Sane people understand generally that what they are experiencing is not normal, but those less lucky do not question for a moment what is happening to them.

He came back to his old job back, and he seemed to be okay for a while. Then it started to happen again. This time he decided to take a different track, and started talking privately (relatively speaking, seeing I heard about it) with a preacher, about his voices. I don’t know how it came around, but the way I heard the story, is the preacher told him he was possessed. He was told he was possessed and there was nothing to be done quickly because these things took time to fix. I guess he did not have that much time, because he took his rifle into the woods one summer day, and the voices quit talking to him.

The irony to me was, no one seemed really to care what the voices told him. It did not matter to anyone if he was talking to God himself, or to a lost spirit from seventeen hundreds, or a demon. Don’t you think that should make a difference? I think what he was hearing should have made a big difference, plus the fact, he thought there was a problem in his hearing voices, and sought out help once before.

Most people do not have the ability to be a prodigy in some area of life, but a few do. If for example the voices were telling him something worthwhile, or better yet, telling him how to raise money for the preacher, would he have ceased to exist on that summer day?

Welcoming change, and not fearing the unknown should be our focus. We tend to approach strange new things with fear, apprehension, and tunnel vision. It would be refreshing to see most of us act differently. Just because it is new, does not mean it is to be feared. If you do not try, you can not fail, if you never fail, you are not growing.