This story is told two ways, is one way is a string of coincidences, and the other way is an intended series of events. Is this story a chain of random events, or is this story an intended course of coincidences which are too disparate not to have divine intervention manipulating events to a desired outcome?

I will start with the version which started some weeks ago.

I have a family member who works at a school which happens to have an apartment complex across and some distance down the street. This apartment complex of has many children which go to the school, a Vista Worker who is working to improve the lives of people in the neighborhood, an elderly woman.

The Vista worker somehow meets my relative. They are at least, two professionals with a similar dream for the neighborhood. A third person is already present in the story. The third person is the retired individual who has put in a request to the Vista volunteer worker for a computer tutoring class.

However the conversation came up, the family member mentioned I did computer tutoring as a volunteer in the past. The Vista worker asked the family member if I would volunteer to hold computer classes for the apartment complex families. The request was passed on to me, and I agreed to volunteer a few hours a week for computer tutoring sessions.

My first volunteer session brings one person to class. The retired person, who also owns a computer, but does not know how to use it. Unknown to me, they have a burning desire to accomplish a singular task, and they need my help. The retired person is a licensed Minister who has something very important to share with the world beyond everyday ministry. They want to share their vision using a computer, as that is the easiest way to reach the most people.

Here is the second version which is a little different.

A retired person who is a licensed Minister, who is also is a self proclaimed Prophet of God, receives direct albeit sporadic communications from God, was once given a visit to  heaven. Afterward, acting on direction from God, they wrote down their experience, and some additional things they were shown or told. It was rewritten a few times, and sent off to one or more publishers for publication. The result to date is poor at best with very few copies sold.

Seeing this dismal result, God sets into play a string of events which brings the retired person cum Prophet and myself together via a computer tutoring session. In the course of the first session the Prophet sends their first ever email to a Christian broadcasting network. A strongly worded expectation, the network needs to read the Prophet’s book.

The second computing class hour with the Prophet, and the rest becomes clear. This Prophet of God in the clothing of a computer illiterate retired person, wishes to get their story into the hands of as many people as possible via the internet having only the vaguest  idea of what the internet is and how the internet works.

It appears to be my duty in the process to assist the Prophet to help get their story out.

End of chapter one. Seen from one perspective there is this string of joined coincidences that benefits a retired person cum Gods Prophet.

From a second perspective, God arranged a number of seemingly unrelated life events so the possibility of a certain outcome could occur. God rolled the dice. My bit part is, I have a blog, some understanding of the internet, and how it works, and have some time to spare each week to help an aging Prophet complete their God given directive.

So now, I am unsettled about this situation. Was there indeed divine intervention, and is this the result? Or is this only a string of unrelated events, and the outcome is simply a coincidence, and no more?

I wish to know, what do you think? What in your opinion is real. What you would do if you were me?

I think  it is too bad so many people feel this way. They do not like their looks, what they do for a living, where they live, and what car they drive. They do not like their body, their face, their teeth, their hair. These desperate people spend a lot of money on fast fixes, and instant  gratification products. They buy products for the top of their head to the end of their toes, and they still are miserable.

So what do they do? They repeat the cycle over and over again. Maybe the hair color was not quite the right shade, the toothpaste does not get their teeth white enough. They go to parlors and have their body hair removed. After all that, it still does not help. Many people who have done all this feel just as bad as they did before they started the process.

If you ask them, they won’t admit it, but they feel like fakes. From the moment they wake up in the morning, to the time they go to bed at night they wear a mask covering up the real them. They worry down deep that at any second they might be exposed for what they really are. Every time they meet a stranger the fear wells up. Any stranger might look deep into their eyes and discern their secret.

Gosh, it must be horrible to go through each and every day in a situation like that. Knowing no matter what you do to improve the way you look, your hair color or hair style, or having your teeth re-whitened it you wake up unhappy. I first noticed this behavior in teenage girls when fitting in is more important than feeling good about yourself. As long as young women fit in, the down deep feelings do not matter.

Of course when I observe the men around me, I notice the same type of behavior. Young men growing into middle age, still making sure they fit in. It is rare to find a man who does not talk only about safe preferred topics. Once the top four or five of mens favorite subjects are talked though, the conversation begins to lag. It is the fitting that matters for men too.

Yet every neighborhood is overflowing with people who are unhappy with their lives and themselves. Men and Women living the American dream, and they are not satisfied with their lives.

I do not understand why they remain this way. The way to have a happier life is not some super secret, buried in some dusty old book. The key to a satisfying life is to start living life for yourself, not for other people. It is that simple, live your life for yourself, and the rest will fall in place. The hardest part of starting to be happy with your life is starting.

After so many years of doing the same things, talking about the same subjects, not letting anyone see your weaknesses, or the idea that you have an interest in something other than popular shallow conversation, it is very hard to change. Most people have been living imitation lives for so long, they no longer remember that once upon a time they liked themselves, and they really enjoyed hobbies and interests that others did not.

It is easy to change, take ten minutes today and think about yourself. Think about something you enjoy that you have not done forever. When you wake up tomorrow, take another ten minutes and do it. Being happy can be that simple.

So how do we wrong think? The most obvious examples are in the state of our health and how we approach the things we do. I know my habits started becoming worse when I became old enough to drive, and fast food was still a novelty. I started walking and riding a bicycle less, driving and eating greasy foods more often.

Over the years we become accustom to adding to our lives and not taking away. Our life style gets better, our food gets more expensive, and in general we have more extra money to spend on ourselves, so we do. We buy better clothes, place to live, and start eating more things that we really should not be eating so much of. That was one of the things I found myself doing, something to eat that once was a treat was now a semi regular activity, and my weight was showing this to be true.

When you are young, your body is pretty resilient, and it can deal with the stresses we place on it from poor health choices. After the kids leave home, our body still does a good job of recovering from years of abuse, but we have to help it a little. I decided it was time to help mine but the impediments to that were and are quite a challenge. I think that is where wrong think gets a foothold in us.

We look around for options to make ourselves better, either in health or in how we feel about ourselves. For some people it is spa’s and lotions, for others it is the gym, and for others…they turn to denial. For a few it is a total remake of parts of our lives. What makes it so hard is we forget over the years the basic things that we need to stay healthy. We gave up on exercise generally as soon as we did not have to exercise. The meals we are eating is not even close to what they should be more often than not. Eventually we start to look around to fix ourselves.

We hear or read about a few things, probably another food, some vitamin or supplement that someone we know takes and has good success with. We find that they are not giving us the expected results so we keep looking. Wrong think is rampant at this point. We go to salad bars as they seem to be healthier, but once the counting is done, all we have done is add salad to the excess food we are eating. Maybe we try diet drinks, or light meals as a substitute for one of our regular meals. By this time we are skipping breakfast because we know we have to eat less.

If we are lucky we get to the point where we have to admit that everything we are doing is wrong. Once we realize everything we are doing is wrong, we start to look around for what we really should be eating, and doing to keep ourselves healthy. We start replacing one food for another, or dropping certain foods or types of foods completely.

Finally we start to see the results we know we should be experiencing. We have broken the cycle of wrong think, and now are practicing Right Think, and now are really learning about how to make ourselves healthier once again. Hopefully we stay on the path. We wrong think many things in our lives from the time we get up to the time we go to bed. Wrong think is so easy because it is how most of the people we know think, and they can’t all be wrong can they?

What we never think about is this martial artist had to both discover, and then choose how to use their gifts. Their actions have no feeling or thought. Their power is what they choose to do. At some point in their life, they had to make a decision that determined the direction for the rest of their life. They knew what their gift was, they just had to choose how to use it.

Most of us do not have the talents of a martial artist. We do however have our own special gifts. Somewhere in our life, herd thinking set in and overtook our thought process! We forgot we are special, and worse we forgot we have our own special gifts.

We must take some time and reflect on our gifts, and what we want from them. We serve no real purpose in this world unless we use our gifts thoughtfully. Acting with knowledge of why we do what we do is our power. If we do not use our gifts thoughtfully we are wasting them. When we waste them we give away our power. When we give away our power we become bitter. When we become bitter we lose our self.

Think and remember what your gifts are. Your gifts are as small or as big as you want them to be. Only you define your limits! Let your gifts and your power show, be proud of what you can do. The universe is waiting for you to rediscover your gifts and start using them!

The park where I walk shares a property line with a middle school. As I was walking a Physical Education Coach was leading his class out for some outside activity before the weather becomes too cold. As I walked up to where he was standing, I stopped and we talked for a few minutes about the kids, differences in generations, and life in general. Sort of a quick comparison conversation of our respective generations.

The kids were supposed to be running around the mile loop as fast as they could, but of course as soon as some of them were what they considered a safe distance from the Coach, their run slowed way down. Some of them were running hard, and some had slowed their run to an ambling walk. I am grateful for seeing these kids do this today, and being able to understand why their running style applies to my life.

In my own life over the years, there have been periods when I went as fast as I could. there were times when I would be wondering why life would not move faster so I could get whatever plan I had set in motion accomplished. There were other times, such as today for example, when a slow walk would suit me just fine. I was in no hurry and there was nothing to rush for. Or really like today, I feel a little run down and slow is about as fast as I care to move.

That is one of the great things about life, as you grow older! You have a bigger base of experience from which to make comparisons with. When I received the very first flu shot that made me feel run down, I was angry that I did this to myself, and I vowed that I would never get another flu shot.

I remember a few years of going without flu shots. During one of them I actually caught a severe case of the flu. The kind of being sick where you feel like you are going to die any second, then you start wishing you would, just so you would quit aching all over? That was the flu I had that year, terrible stuff! Now days, I do not mind feeling a little run down for a day or two, because I know feeling run down for a day or so is not as bad as being in bed for a week, so sick that dying does not feel like such a terrible alternative to the aching.

Now you know what I am grateful for this week. Over the years I have gained the wisdom to know that a little inconvenience is sometimes a better choice than a lot of pain later. Also along with all that gained wisdom of dubious value, I know these situations do not only apply to flu shots.

I was told to call this process, the Dark Night Of The Soul. I have read some call this, the Long Night, but I have found this to be a description and not a title. If you have never entered it, you are blessed. If you know your world is very very wrong, and there is no medical reason, you have my heartfelt sympathy. One recent example is contained in the recently released letters of Mother Theresa, of her life long struggle with the Dark Night of the Soul.

I have read Wikipedia’s reference of the Dark Night as a struggle with letting go of egos hold on the psyche. Reality is a lot more personal and painful. Ego is a powerful part of our personality which takes charge of us. Ego is selfish and self centered, and the primary filter of our world view. Ego is responsible for how we act and react. If you are not in the throes of the Dark Night, you may be chuckling right now. I have a sobering thought for you. You are not chuckling, your Ego is telling you to laugh at what you are reading. When you are in the Dark Night, Ego would rather you die than give up its spot of running the person that is you. It will lie to you, deceive you, cut you off from everything that is important to you, and from those you love. If you continue to try to displace your ego, your ego will create a world of misery and despair you never imagined could exist on earth.

When you think everyone around you cannot become more detached and distant, ego will suggest you end your life to end the misery. At this point some going through the Dark Night of the Soul may turn to Alcohol, drugs, or other methods of trying to make their pain go away. Ego would rather be in charge of a suicidal addict than give up its position of authority within you.

The battle is almost over at this point. There are only a few choices available. Give in to ego and spend your life feeling trampled, defeated, and worthless. Turn to drugs, alcohol, or self abuse trying to deal with the emotional baggage of your life. The third choice is the correct choice to make. This third choice defeats ego by simply not fighting. You reach a point, where no matter what happens without ego being in charge, it can not be any worse than the private hell of the present. Getting to this point and letting ego go opens a bright new world no one would have guess exists.

It is a love based world of contentment, and everything is exactly as it should be. It is a world of gratitude, where an individual is aware that everything operates from a starting point of love. It is a world of unity, where nothing is separate or isolated from anything else. A world where you are everything and everything is you.

This change does not happen over night. It is not a process of being in a struggle for your very life, and the next moment is all warm and fuzzy. It takes time because it takes time to go through the cycle. At this point you will not care, but slowly your world will become perfect. Surviving your Dark Night of the Soul may sound like fluff, or fantasy, but it is true and it is waiting for you. If you see yourself in these words, know it is worth the battle! Don’t quit and don’t accept good enough – no matter how bad things appear to become. I promise you, it is worth every moment of feeling lost and alone once you get through your Dark Night of the Soul.

Technorati Tags: ego, soul, dark night, self help, psychology

The Marine Corps is not satisfied with a hot body to mindlessly charge a machine gun nest. The Marine Corps wants people who are intimately aware of their own death. People who are intimate with their own death are more aware than other people, and generally, when they do something it is for the right reasons. That may sound silly, but it is not. If the Marine Core just wanted cannon fodder, they would not be focused on the extreme, and intensive training each recruit goes through before he or she is entitled to call themselves a Marine.

When I first read Castaneda, I thought to myself, he was being silly and overly dramatic. We are all going to die someday, so who cares? That is exactly what Castaneda and the Marine Corps care about. Most people walking the earth today simply do not care about their pending death. They are either scared of the thought, or they push it out into that place we put everything that will occur sometime, but not soon.

If I wished to waste your time, I could list thousands of examples of people who never considered their death in any fashion, and without warning they ceased to exist. I can name only a few people that I know personally who have really taken the time to contemplate their death and have become intimate with it.

Those folks that are intimate with their own deaths know their is no time to waste. Wasting time is not the same as doing nothing. Wasting time is not caring about your own individual actions or their effects on others and the world around you. Wasting time because there is always a time in the future to make things right.

People who are intimate with their death know that that future may end in the next instant, and they do not have a guarantee of any future time. When I began to have an understanding of this concept it seemed sort of silly. Of course I have plenty of time. I have tomorrow, probably next month, most likely next year, and so on, and so forth.

People who are intimate with their own death live with a different thinking about time. They understand that they may not be here tomorrow, so they do everything in a right now time. They know they do not have time to ignore their children, their spouse, or themselves. Ten minutes from now may be too late for them to come back and correct any mistakes, apologize, or decide to pay attention.

This does not mean that people who are intimate with their own deaths are morbid, or fixated on the end of their lives, because they are not. What they are is more mindful, aware of their actions, and how they affect those around them. They are generally less prone to quick bursts of anger. They are more open with their feelings, and appear to have thicker skins than others in their social group. They are also more comfortable with themselves because they are intimate with their own deaths.

Like anyone else, they do not know when their death is going to happen, or how it will happen, but they know it could be in the next five minutes. Because of this knowledge they are more careful to make this minute count. As uncomfortable as it may sound, try to contemplate your own death, and become friends with it. It will change your life for the better in ways you never thought possible. You will begin to understand how precious and brief your life, and the lives of those around you really are.

Technorati Tags: life, spirit, death, self help, introspection, Marine

When I was living on my own, and these folks came to my door, I would encourage them to share with me what they believed to be their truth. After one or two visits and no arguing, I would not see them again. At one function I attended some years ago, I found myself in conversation with one of the men who used to knock on my door.

I asked why he did not visit any more with his friends? I was curious both about what more they would tell me, and also why they stopped trying to convert me. This man told me they thought I was a minister of some kind, and there was no sense trying to convert me.

I thought that was funny, because a minister was the last thing I would have considered myself to be! After a while they all quit coming around to try to convert me, and I forgot about them. Some time later, I moved to a bigger city, and there the process started all over again. The outcome was about the same, except after listening to the many different versions of what they had to say, some of them would ask me what I thought?

This was my opportunity to explain what I have learned over the years to them. The sum of what I learned from my own reading, talking, and some television programs has taught me a lot. I shared with them those things I found to be common in everything they had told me over the years plus what I learned on my own.

Each group has a slightly different version of how this all came about. None of us here today really knows what the true story is, or even if any what we believe is true, or made up. I was not there, and you were not there, so we can only speculate on what is the truth. Thankfully it does not matter.

If you imagine a special present, it is easier to explain. As I remove the bow, the ribbons, and wrapping from the package and open the box, I see the fundamentals we all share. When I look closely, some basic truths becomes evident.

We are all one family.

None of us has a monopoly the truth.

It is our responsibility to live the best life we can.

We should try to love and be good to one another.

We should do our best to treat each other with respect.

We all come from the same place. Not one of us on earth comes from somewhere else.

That is all there is to living well, everything else is fluff.

Some of these people, after hearing me did not know what to say. One of them decided they would be sending an Elder to speak to me as I was obviously confused, thinking this way. Others have put up futile reply’s, but quit part way through when they realize there is no real argument. I usually never see them anymore, as there is nothing for them to argue over, and no one to convince.

It is much easier to keep it simple, as simple allows for more agreement, and less argument. If there is nothing to argue over, then these folks have nothing to discuss. Take away the argument, and you take away the wind in the sails. Happy sailing!

Technorati Tags: life, love, rules, self help