The Fear of Death

"Today you are alive and no one is beside you, but if tomorrow you were to die, many would come to see you.  Today you are alive and no one will give you a hug, but if tomorrow you were to die, no one would want to let you go.  Today you are alive and no one will give you a rose, but if tomorrow you were to die, they would send you bouquets and wreaths of flowers.  Today no one pays attention to you but when you die you will be popular for a full day.  They will post pictures of you on social media saying how much they love you, how special you are to them, and how they can't live without you.  Today you are alive and they make you cry, but if you were to die tomorrow everyone would cry for you..."

This is one of my favorite short poems.  There have been no truer words said.  Yesterday night I was talking to a dear friend of mine who can see the energy of spirits forming their image.  I had sent her a picture and she said that there was one hiding behind my door.  I was not surprised since in my years of spiritual practice I have come to sense many of them.  She said that this particular one almost looked like Death.  I said to her: ohh great!!! they are finally taking me!!! I am done with whatever my purpose of being stuck in a human body is.  It will finally be over and I am finally going home!  Happy Dance!!!

I decided to post that experience on Facebook, there was obviously a reason for it because to tell you the truth I already know how humans react to the idea of death.  It was not quite clear to me why that inspiration had come, until this morning.  I woke up to the song Over the Rainbow playing on my phone, I usually fall asleep to healing music every night and the loop of it continues until I wake up.  It has never been so that this song plays on the loop I have set up, but it did...  This song used to give me goosebumps because the person who wrote it, wrote thinking about heaven.  They were describing how home (heaven) feels, even though they didn't really say that out loud.  Most people know though, it is a popular song played when someone passes.  Anyhow, I went to check Facebook and sure enough, humans were commenting...

One of them had posted the emoji that is rolling their eyes, they know I am not afraid of death and that I am happy that this physical body I am in is not eternal.  But I know they don't like the idea of it and I know that they don't like to be reminded.  Then there was a friend of mine who is like a little sister to me, I told her to make sure to call me because I was leaving soon, she said I was being crazy...  Someone else was wondering what was going on... And then there was one that was probably the most irrational one, it was someone who only interacts with me on Facebook.  I don't speak to this person outside of my Facebook posts but for some reason they said they did not want to say goodbye to me yet.  That one started to irritate me a little because the physical absence of my body would really have absolutely no impact in their life, they don't even know who I really am, even though they think they know because they know one of my biological parents, but neither of my biological parents know who I am.

I stepped back from all that, grounded myself because feeling negative emotions means I am allowing my human self to take over too much, and then I smiled and laughed.  Humans are so afraid of something they don't really know about.  I was immediately reminded of a meeting I had last Friday where we all mentioned that with technology we have created this idea that our human bodies have to live forever, and if they don't then we feel this extreme pain.  It used to be that people died a lot more than they do now; I say a lot more because there were no treatments for a lot of diseases that would have extremely shorten a person's life but know there are.  Now, we are used to going to the doctor and getting a pill, a treatment, something to make that illness not progress as quickly.  We want people to live, we want to save them.  It can be seen as a noble idea but more often than not, it is a selfish one.

I have gotten into arguments for saying that, but I know I am not the only one who thinks that way.  I have been lucky enough to meet people in the past few months who see it for what it is.  A friend of mine and I were chatting the other day and she was explaining that her grandmother keeps going through surgeries she does not want only because she wants to make her children happy.  Of course, none of her children see that she is suffering and she is ready to go, they just keep pushing her to keep living.  I told her that I could not find one person who could give me a logical explanation why someone should keep living when they are in pain, the only reasons they could give me was their own selfish ones.  The person should live because there are many people who would miss them.  What about the people who still need them?  What about how their family will feel?  They are not thinking about anyone but themselves when they are thinking they want to die.  It was all emotional responses, I said to her.  Her answer was that someone should live because there are things they still want to do while in physical form.  I said yes! Someone should live because they want to continue to live, not because of what anyone else wants.

It is true, in the end the dead person is no longer suffering.  The dead person is free and the only ones who suffer are the ones who remain alive.  I wondered why this phenomenon happens because to tell you the truth most of the people who cry and suffer for the dead person did not even spend enough time with that person to feel that way.  Their physical presence was more than likely not something they experienced on a daily basis and therefore the idea that you would miss them to me seems irrational.  I now bring you back to the beginning of this post... the best reason I can come up with and the one that fits perfectly is REGRET.

Regret is one of the things that humans carry with them on a daily basis.  We are all always thinking that we have tomorrow to make decisions, that we have tomorrow to change something, we have tomorrow to talk to someone, we have tomorrow to spend time... And then when that tomorrow takes that someone or something away, we feel sad because we are hit with the reality that we don't really have that much time.  It is funny because every time someone dies, that is the mood of the funeral or memorial but then the very moment the funeral or memorial is over we go back to the same way of thinking.  It is why I don't like them.  I was taken to one last year and every one of the persons who knew the diseased would say something great about her and then would add how life is short and it should be enjoyed.  How we should cherish those who are still here with us and be grateful... I know that the majority of them went on after that to live just the same, until someone else dies at which point they will all say the same things.

Isn't it amazing though? Humans fear death because they fear loss, but they live their lives as if they will never lose anything or anyone.  They keep away from the people they love and who love them because they think they will all have tomorrow to enjoy it with them.  They stick around toxic people because they think they will have enough time to change their lives and enjoy it later without them.  They put themselves in situations that will require an extreme amount of effort only because they think that they will have time to enjoy themselves later.  They overwork themselves because they think they have time to enjoy the fruits of their labor later.  They get careers in fields they don't want because of the same thing... And then eventually it catches on to them that they didn't really have enough time.  Illness kicks in, death comes to visit, and suddenly it feels like all of it was time wasted.  Regret sets in and pain usually follows.  But God forbids we actually acknowledge every day that our physical lives are short and we actually take the time to let those we love that we love them.  Take the time to spend it with them, to enjoy them... We won't, we won't because even though we know we have short lives and that they could end at any point, we still deceive ourselves into thinking that we do have time.  That those we love will wake up tomorrow and we will have another opportunity, so it is ok to sit and think about doing that today without actually doing it...

We can get rid of the people who don't fill our lives another day, today is ok to answer them out of respect and out of courtesy.  It is ok to do the things we don't like today because tomorrow is another day and we will definitely have an opportunity to change things.  The truth is that we are not even promised the next second of life, so we should take the opportunity now.

Why am I not afraid of death?  Because I have taken the time to let those I love that I love them.  I have ensure that I did everything I could to spend the time with the ones I love.  I know I have done everything in my power to be there and to do the things that bring me joy.  Even though some of them have not wanted to be there or spent time, I made myself available because that is all I could do.  I have enjoyed every moment I have lived, even the bad ones because I have learned from them.  I have fallen many times but I learned, got up and kept going.  I left the bad taste of it behind and took with me the lesson which in turn helped me grow and do things better as I continued.  So, when the time comes I will go happily... I will go happily because I lived the way I wanted.

Communication and Relationships

I have been thinking about this picture lately... A while ago, when I first started college and I was just 17 years old I had to make a presentation for Speech class.  My presentation was about what made relationships work and last a long time.  Everyone was baffled when I said that it was not the amount of love that people had for each other but how well they worked on communicating with each other.  By this time I have seen relationships fail because of the lack of communication.  My biological father's first wife and him would always argue and throw things to each other, eventually they would physically fight and hurt each other.  During high school, I had had two different relationships.  The first one ended because he was jealous and instead of telling me how he felt he would just react.  I would try to talk about it without arguing but it was pointless.  I couldn't stand it, so I broke it off.  The second one ended up kissing someone else, talked to everyone about it except me... I remember not hearing from him for a few days until someone else told me what everyone was talking about.  I was more upset at the fact that he didn't come to talk to me first.  We used to talk for hours him and I  and in a way I expected to be told, not be kept in the dark.

Those were my high school relationship experiences, neither of them lasted too long.  I had tried it again with the second boyfriend, but it ended when there was an issue with mutual friends and instead of asking about my side of the story, I was told off.  On each instance, there was no effective communication.  It was either only one person talking or both not talking at all.  It didn't matter that I loved both of these guys, I truly did, because in the end love was not enough.  As I grew older and I kept seeing how my biological father behaved, this communication thing became of utmost importance to me.  You see, my biological father is an abuser (I think I gave that out earlier when I pointed out how he fought with his second wife); one of the things abusers do is that they will use words to hurt you, they will physically hurt you, and then they will gaslight you.  An abuser will hurt you one day and then come back the next day pretending nothing happened.  They will act completely different and not ever want to talk about what happened before.  Then later on IF you bring it up, they will either tell you that it never happened or they will blame you for it.  Back when I was younger and around this individual, I did not know that was it.  But still, I despised that he did that too many times and because of that, I made it a point that when I got into a relationship the person I was with would be someone with whom I could communicate effectively.  It could even be someone who didn't know how to communicate effectively but who was open to learning and growing with me in that regard. 

During the first serious relationship, we were great at communicating with each other at first and everything worked out great.  We would talk about what bothered each of us and we never really fought.  As the relationship progressed we started to not say to each other what was bothering us and so the communication stopped.  Instead of coming to each other to communicate what we needed from one another, he started to go to his parents and I would just keep it all to myself.  Until one day he was ready to leave and didn't tell me.  At that point we actually talked, but because he had spoken to his parents about what he didn't like about me, now his parents didn't think we should be together.  That put a strain in the relationship and after that it was just all downhill from there.  Once again, lack of effective communication ruined that one.  I loved him and we tried to work on it, but the communication factor was pretty much gone and that made things extremely difficult.  We ended up as good friends, who eventually drifted apart but I always left the door open if he ever needed someone to talk to.

Relationships, any kind of relationships, whether they are romantic relationships or friendships, require people to communicate.  There is no relationship, it does not matter how much love there is for one another, that will work without two people knowing how to effectively communicate with each other.  Today I was wondering why it is that we stop communicating effectively with another person.  I know in my experience it has been because I was hurt and couldn't find the right words to say to the other person in a way that I would not hurt them in return.  Sometimes it was fear of how they would react to what I said and that was just me remembering the relationship I had with my biological father, who would always lash out and get defensive when you told him you felt something he did was not right.  That ended up being the same with the guy I ended up marrying, he is also an abuser and while I had learned to communicate more effectively even without really having good role models, I took a few steps backwards with that marriage.  Of course, I knew that would end because there was a lot that was hidden and a lot that was never said. 

As far as other people go, I think it's similar reasons... Some of them feel like they would be ashamed of saying something they feel, or telling someone about an experience that might explain their reaction because someone else reacted back at them and so now they want to avoid it.  It is trying to avoid confrontation, avoiding a fight, avoiding doing things that might make things worse.  And so instead of communicating, they withdraw, they stay quiet and then all those feelings just get bottled up and shaken around like a soda bottle... until eventually someone opens the bottle up and everything comes out bursting...

So how is it that one can change this?  By being aware... In your relationships, any of the ones you have, you have to be aware of how you feel and you have to make time to speak about it.  Both people need to be receptive to the other, and not take things being said as an attack because as soon as you do that, you will stop being receptive and start being defensive.  Both have to be open to growing and set fear aside, and talk from a place of love.  It seems something that is very easy to do, but I have found many times it is not.  There can be an extreme amount of love between two people and instead of using that love as a driver to continue what made the love grow in the first place, they use that love as the only basis to the relationship and they forget that is not what made it work to begin with.  I have lost many relationships in the past, and they have all been lost because of that lack of communication, I know some of them could have been saved if communication was opened but I also found myself in a place where there was only one person willing to do so... And so I realized it would not work.  Some of them have hurt losing more than others but, in the end I think I have learned from each of them and I have taken comfort in that.  They have helped me grow in many different ways and understand myself a little better, and for that all I can do is say thanks.

Effective communication is to a relationship like a good balance between water and sunlight are to a plant.  They are needed in order fora plant to grow, just like it is needed in order for a relationship to flourish.

Why should we be at peace with our mortality?

There are two ways to look at life.  The first one is as if every day you are given one more day to live, thinking that if you knew for sure this was your last day, how would you want your last day to go? Would you want to be happy or would you want to let things bother you?
The second one is seeing this day as one less day to live.  One day closer to the blissfulness that awaits us all when we pass. In this case, if you are one day closer to that blissfulness why not be happy about it?  Why not enjoy that you are almost done? Why not celebrate?
In either case none of the things that happen today will matter, so why let them bother you?
To me it does not matter which one you choose, each of them should be respected by others.  Unfortunately, that is not always the case.

In the process of ascension, one of the things we learn is to be at peace with our mortality.  To accept our mortality and that of others fully.  Spirit once said to me that only those who stay alive are the ones who suffer, everyone else is free.  I wondered what exactly Spirit meant by that and then I had a few people around me who lost someone they loved, each of them were devastated.  Everyone was crying, everyone was remembering all the things that they didn't do with them.  Everyone would point out how we all have very limited time and we should be happy that we are alive.  The misery that came from every death was astounding.  I couldn't understand because to tell you the truth, whether you believe in Spirit or not, when it comes to death... It is just an ending... It is the end of every bit of suffering, every bit of pain and so that person was not suffering anymore so why be so miserable that they were gone? Why not be happy that they are now free?

In my belief, the only thing that dies is our physical body and nothing else.  The physical body though is just a vessel to carry the energy that we are.  That energy is released and freed when we "die".  That energy goes back to the source of all life, to a place where there are no bounds.  And that place is the most amazing place ever.  It is a place full of peace and love; a love that no human could ever understand because it is a love that no matter what you do, you are worthy of.  And with this belief I started to realize how bad I just wanted to be there, how ready I was to go back to this place I call home.  The first time I felt this it felt bad that I wanted to go, it felt like I was resisting and everyone around me, those who are not as awaken just made the feeling be even worse.

Eventually I stopped saying anything, I just kept waking up saying to myself: "You have one less day here, you are almost home, you are almost done" and those words made me keep this joyous feeling alive, it made me smile.  Everyone else was oblivious to it, they didn't know why I was so happy but I felt like I couldn't tell them because as soon as I did I would fall from my happy place.  They would all start to pull me down with their words and their lack of understanding.  Some of them would even stop talking to me, not realizing that more than likely when I actually do go home they would end up talking about how much they wish I was still here.  They would all start saying how much they missed me, but none of them would ever acknowledge that when they had me here, they pulled away out of fear of losing me.  It will all then be very hypocritical because the time to be around, the time to talk, the time to enjoy is now.  It is not tomorrow, it was not yesterday, it is today.

Two days ago I let people pull me down from that, as soon as I said I was ready to go home they all started to give me reasons why I was supposedly still here, why I needed to stay here.  Oddly enough all the reasons that they gave me were based on the same reason they were saying I should not want to die--selfishness.  There was not one of them that said to me: "You are almost there, so don't fret" each and everyone of them said something like: "I am happy that you are still here" or "I don't like it when you say that because I want you to still be here" or my favorite "There are people who still need you to be here".   It is pure selfishness, the same selfishness that they throw in someone's face when someone says they don't want to be here.  All those statements are about them, they are not about me, they are about how they feel and what they would feel when I am no longer in physical form.  It is not about caring about me, it is caring about them.  It was not respecting the things I wanted, but only making sure that the things they wanted happened.

It used to bother me that they didn't understand, that they didn't get it.  It was frustrating that they didn't see how selfish they were too by putting themselves before someone they say they care about.  I asked Spirit why it was that I was so bothered by this, why is it that I wanted them to understand so much.  And then I realized that I was putting too much weight on the things that people who are unable to understand my path (they really don't have to) are feeling.  You see, I am not here to make anyone feel better.  I am not here to control anyone else's feelings.  I am here to guide some of those who are open to learning, those who are open to understanding of a different way of seeing things.  I am not here to push anyone to believe any different, I wish people could respect what I believe more but I also know that I can't make them.  And so my other job is to not let them affect me, what they want and what they feel is not my concern.  Giving guidance does not mean the others will do as what they are being guided to do, no matter how much you would want them to.

So what next? Since I realized that most humans are not capable of being at peace with their mortality, I have also realized that the more I point it out, the more of those people who are not in alignment with me will go.  The more of those people who don't really care will walk away, because they can't handle it and that is ok.  The relationships will evolve to something different and that will be amazing to watch and create.  It won't mean I love each of them any less either.  It will just mean that their actions, no matter how much I care about them, won't bother me.  It also means that I will not be afraid of telling them that whatever they feel about whether or not I am here in physical form or not, does not matter to me because they don't get to choose what will get me to my happy place.  They are not in charge of my happiness, I am.  And because I am in charge of my happiness, I get to choose how I get to that happiness, they just need to worry about how they are going to get to theirs.

So why should we be at peace with our mortality?  Because we are all going to die.  The sooner we come to accept and be at peace with that, the sooner we will start living life differently.  The sooner we will not worry about the things we can't control.  The better life will flow because then you realize that no matter how you look at life, whether it is one less day to live or one more day to live, what happens today will not matter when we are no longer here, whether we die today or in 30 years is irrelevant.  All we gotta do today is celebrate either that you are closer to your destination or that you were given an opportunity to do something different.  Either way, the goal is the same--to get happy.  Whichever way you choose to look at it is up to you, all the rest of us have to do is respect it.

Police vs. Citizens

There has been so much violence reported in the past week.  We have people killing each other left and right it seems.  We have divided people into groups and then somehow we have put each group against one another.  It would seem that this is a new thing, we get surprised every time we hear someone has killed someone else.  Like it is an unbelievable thing for a human being to do, because why would a human intentionally hurt someone else?

In the past few years I have gone through what I like to call an enlightenment period.  I have begun to see the realities of life while also keeping faith that things are not all that bad all the time.  I have come to learn that the term humane needs a different meaning, that violence sells books, TV shows, and even the news.  The word humane means to have compassion towards another person or being, but there is very little compassion shown between human beings.

We are the one species that is capable of killing just for the sake of killing.  We have been doing it for years.  I was thinking about the animal kingdom and I have yet to see an animal kill another animal just because they could.  Animals kill each other to eat and survive, not because one of them was in the way.  Animals do not try to control each other, they just stay out of each other's way.  Humans could use a little lesson on that.  People kill each other out of jealousy, differences of opinion, or just as a form of control.

Even with rational minds, in the animal kingdom it seems we should be at the bottom of the list.  We can't accept each other, have healthy debates without someone insulting another person.  We can't have a different opinion because someone might get shot for it.  We can't have a different religion because someone might not like it.  We are so intolerant of one another that we divide ourselves in groups.  We become biased and take sides and then we wonder why there is such a thing.

Lately we have our attention between police officers and citizens, more specific African American citizens and the police.  A minority vs. a majority.  We are all in shock that this is happening and I wonder why we are in shock, this has been happening for years.  It is not just the police department, it is the justice system, the people who are supposed to protect others, politicians who are supposed to create the laws that supposedly keep people safe.  Instead of tolerating each other and talking about different ideas to make this country greater, we have been creating a separation between everyone.  One side thinks and feels they are better than the other and the other side feels oppressed by the side that feels they are better.

Then the side who feels is better gets hurt somehow because the oppressed side is able to get something change, so whenever possible the other side will punish the oppressed side harder.  This goes on and on in circles and it is never ending.  It won't end until we all realize that each of us needs to be more tolerant of each other.  It won't end until we leave the feelings of greatness and the feelings of oppression to the side and realize that under our skins we all look very much alike.  That each of our bodies will rot inside a hole in the ground.  It won't end until we stop diving people and realize that there are bad humans of every color, every ethnicity, and religion.  It won't end until we all accept that humans are the one animal capable of anything, that they can reason themselves to think that hurting someone else is a good thing.  History has shown us that and it seems that we still have not learned.

I gave in and watched God's Not Dead

Just finished watching the movie God's Not Dead.  I have to admit the only reason I watched it was because Jesse Metcalfe is starring on the second one and he is so handsome that I just want to go see it.  I thought the first movie gave some premise to the second one so I should watch it.  In other words: his handsomeness made me do it...

For the purpose of this blog, I will just refer to the deity as God.  The concept of God can have many different meanings and God to you can be female rather than male.  For others it is a supreme being with both qualities, others like to think that their is not just one deity but many.  Then there are those who don't want to refer to the deity as God but refer to it as Spirit, others call it the universe.  All of which are perfectly fine because faith is a personal thing.  You give meaning to whatever it is that you believe in.  Unless we are going to discuss in order to learn more rather than try to convince the other person that they are wrong, then there is absolutely no reason why we should argue over belief systems.  In this argument, neither point is right or wrong.  
The movie started being pretty interesting; college students being told by a philosophy professor that God is dead and if everyone agrees to that then the semester will be pretty easy and time will not be spent arguing over a "fairy tale."  Philosophy is the love of wisdom and it would be very hypocritical for a good Philosophy professor to not want to hear the arguments his/her students have over such controversial topic, but I get it.

The argument over the existence of God has been going on for centuries, neither side has been able to prove whether or not he exists.  The arguments often used are either that he exists because this book says he does or that he does not exist because you cannot prove his existence.

I should not be surprised at the turn the movie took after a few minutes, I mean it is a "Christian" movie after all.  However, if the intent of the movie was to convince people who are at the fence of either believing or not in God that God is really not dead, then they did a poor job.   Using the Bible as an argument against some of the very weak arguments against the existence of God, does not really make your argument very effective.

As the movie went on, the more the Bible was used the more the movie was a turn off.  All I kept thinking is that there are so many strong arguments for the existence of God, so many good philosophers who have argued that God does exist, that we don't just need the Bible to justify it.  At some point in the movie a Muslim girl is introduced, she believes in the God of Christianity rather than Allah.  Both of which can be compared to be the same deity but just using a different name.  This girl's faith is found out by her father and she is thrown out of the house.  I realized that the movie was not about whether God is dead or not dead,  the movie is about whether or not Christianity is dead or not.

Is Christianity dead?  We don't need Christianity to believe in God, that is for sure.  However, Christianity is slowly dying.  The Bible is not good enough to prove to people that God exists and that therefore we must follow a set of rules, or else we will find damnation.  Christians argue that Jesus died in a cross for our sins so that we would be saved.  But then they also say that if we don't follow what the Bible says we will be damned.  Which one is it?  Can we have it both ways?  Can it be that we were saved but we also have to follow a set of rules in order to ensure that we are not damned once we die?  It seems to me that and all knowing God would know that humans would have continued to commit sins, therefore asking us to follow the rules after sending his son to save us from damnation seems a little stupid, for someone who knows it all.

Maybe we are reading the Bible wrong, maybe it is not Jesus who saved us from damnation by dying on the cross but rather that we as people killed Jesus by committing acts of violence and betrayal, otherwise known as sins.  So he died not for our sins but because of them.  The story of how Jesus died just shows us how terrible mankind can be, and the way mankind is right now just show us that we have made very little progress to change and grow.  Based on the story, why did Jesus die?  He died because he thought different, he died because mankind did not have the courage to open their minds and think for themselves.

It is sad that society has still not changed.  The movie was another way of trying to bring people into the Christian faith, not into the faith of God.  It is another plot to say this way is right and your way is wrong, when the reality is that none of us really know the right way.  Faith is just that, faith.   Some people will have faith in scientific studies, while others will have faith in a supreme being with no name.  Then others will have faith in the fact that they really don't know what the truth is and that is fine with them, while others will put all their faith into the teachings of the Bible.  Are any of them right or wrong?  The truth is none of them are either right or wrong.

This movie would have been a lot more powerful, had it used more than scripture to argue God's existence.  It would have been more powerful, had it not just picked one religion over another.  The movie would have been way more powerful to convince people to look into the existence of God had it not subtly tried to show that Christianity was the only way to find God.  The movie would have been a lot more powerful had it focus on what the name of the movie is trying to convey, that God is not dead and not that Christianity is the way to God.

So is God dead?  That depends on how you see what it means to be alive and what it means to be dead.  One thing is for sure though, God must have been alive at one point, otherwise we wouldn't be talking about God so much right now.  God has been causing controversy even before the Bible was written and I don't think a dead being that never existed could cause so much controversy.  In my opinion, even if you don't believe in God, the mere thought of not being able to imagine that being exists gives life to that being.  Being able to talk about God is enough for me to say God exists and that God is not dead, but that is just me.  I don't think I am right for believing in God and you wrong for not believing in God; I think neither of us can prove the other one wrong, and that is perfectly fine and perfectly acceptable.

Randomness

I was sitting here thinking: "One should not spend money they have not yet acquired or spend all the money they have acquired."  That is the problem America has, we are a nation of spenders; every penny we get paid we spend.  We worked all our lives to pay for things and then when the time came to retire we had nothing to live on, so what did we do? We cried out and said: "Government help us." What did the government do? They created Social Security and said well we are going to take money off your paycheck and save it for when you retire because you are not capable of doing that on your own. 

Then the years passed and the plan proved to be flawed, there were not enough money being taken out of one person's paycheck in order to provide for that person's retirement, and people were living longer than government thought they would live.  Now, Social Security is not solvent and my generation will probably not get to ever use it.  Whose fault is that though?

 

Partly is our fault, our society is bred to be spenders.  We live off the idea that we can always get a new credit card, charge what we want and pay it later.  We believe that eventually we are going to make more money and then when we make more money we spend more money.  As I was sitting here thinking why in the hell do we do that? And all I could come up was because we are unhappy. 

It is a human condition to get rewarded for things we don't want to do, we go on a diet and after one week of eating only herbs we say: "Well I have been good this week, let me buy me an ice cream."  It is something that comes from many many generations ago, we clean our rooms because our parents promise that we will get something in return, the reward for stopping what we were doing (having fun) and doing something we do not like. 

And then as we grow older we are marked by our parents telling us how we have to make a living.  A child comes with a dream they have, they want to be an artist and the parent will feed that dream until the child reaches a certain age and then the parent will say: "You are too old for that, you need to think about how you are going to make a living.  You cannot make a living by being an artist."  This gets repeated so much that eventually the child ends up going to college (something they did not want to do) and studying something they did not want to study, and then getting a job they did not want to get. 

The child, now an adult, was conditioned to go and work at a job they will never enjoy but that "pays well."  So they go to work every day, they are miserable because they don't enjoy what they do, at the end of the work day or the work week they go home in all their misery to find something that will make them feel better.  Video games, alcohol, drugs, shopping, food... Anything that will reward them for doing something they did not like to do. 

And so there goes the money they make, they believe that they deserve to buy the video games, the alcohol, the drugs, the food, because they did something that was draining and that they did not enjoy.  Every few months they have to take a break from their jobs because "they deserve it", "they've earned it", they have worked so hard for so many months that now it is time to spend money on a vacation.  But wait!  They are still paying off the last vacation that they took, and then what? Well the credit card is almost paid off so we can use it again right now.  Then we will get back to our miserable jobs and complain about having to pay them off.

After this I was thinking: "what if the reason we have so many depressed people and angry people wanting to kill others all the time was that we are all so miserable because we are conditioned to do things that we completely dislike?"

Could you imagine a world where the child is never told that they should just make sure they go work at something that will pay them enough to live and instead we tell them to go follow their passion and put focus on that.  Tell them that yes it will be hard work but that it is something they can do.  Teach them that hard work is not despised when it is something we love to do. 

Then probably we would have less alcoholics, less drug addicts, less angry, depressed, and violent people around.  Because they would be focus on doing something they love to do and not something they have to do in order to survive and then maybe all these different things they spend money on would never be an issue, that extra money could be put away for retirement.  It could be put away to pay off a house so you do not have to worry about paying rent when you are no longer able to work.  It could be invested and made more rather than just spent.  People could even help each other more rather than compete with each other so much. 

Maybe if we learned how to be and remain happy and full of joy then we would not cry and cling for the help of the very people who thrive and advance their lives by making sure we continue to have the same problems. 

Religion, religion, religion...

What a wonderful topic this is!!! I just love it when I bump into someone that loves to try and feed me the Lord Jesus Christ against my will.
I was on the bus the other day and this guy was trying to convince another guy about finding happiness. I sat there listening to him talk about a book he was holding (no I had no idea what the book was about) then suddenly the guy states how people are so depressed and angry all the time because they are worried about how much money they are making, they are worried about getting a better car, better house, better things and that stress just takes the life out of you.  I had to agree with that statement, we do tend to put a lot of emphasis on certain things that in the end won't really matter, but then he decided to add that one piece of advice that makes absolutely no sense to me, the one sentence I have the most fun with as soon as it comes out of someone's mouth because let's face it... Whether you are a believer or not in a higher power, you can't prove or disprove its existence, therefore when it comes to God, no one out there can say for certain that he/she exists or that he/she doesn't exist.  He went on to say: In order to be happy you must first find God....
Sitting there I just looked at him and said: You must first prove that there is a God, otherwise how can you find something that you don't know for certain that exists?
And so it began, of course he was not able to do that, however his argument did not end there... He decided that he would use Robin Williams as an example of someone who had everything and decided to end his life anyway.  Mr. Williams had bipolar disorder and was also diagnosed with Parkinson's which ended up making things even worse for him.  Education is key when you are trying to argue a point, I don't think people understand that. So then he added: Who gives you the power to go ahead and take your life, who has told these people that you get to choose when and how you die?
Free will my friend, that is the power I've been given, according to the God that exists according to the book a lot of people follow for guidance, we are all given free will.  Free Will means we decide what we are going to do with our lives, not anyone else. As sad as it is to hear that someone was in so much pain that they thought there was no other way out but to kill themselves... well, that is one choice every single person in this planet has, the stigma that you will go to hell when you kill yourself needs to really stop because again first you have to prove that there is such a thing as a hell, and then you have to prove that hell is a bad thing, neither of which can be proven.
On that same note you will also have to prove that there is a heaven and unfortunately its existence cannot be proven or denied, so why do we continue to have arguments over things like this?
The idea is that people need to believe in something, (disclaimer: I do believe in God but I also know that since I cannot prove his existence I have no business trying to convince other people of his existence) we have an innate need to want some sort of certainty from life.  When things are not going the way we might want them to be going we need to try and find an explanation for it, when there is none we resort to things like this.  And that is ok, trust me I am not saying it is not, what it is not ok is to try and change everyone else's view of the world with a view that cannot be absolutely proven, this is to include science (yes I know I will be pushing some buttons here) but hear me out (or in this case, please keep reading)...
Scientifical knowledge starts with an observation, this observation is usually made by a human being, this human being then decides to go ahead and come up with a question about what they are observing and after that they come up with a hypothesis which they then have to run a series of tests in order to prove... Now in order to say that this pattern can give us answers that are absolutely certain, answers that have no option of being changed in the future, one must first believe with absolute certainty that humans are unable to make mistakes.
Some people might believe that scientists are unable to err, there is no justification for someone to believe this because I have yet to hear someone not use the words: "human error" in their vocabulary, and unless scientists are something else other than human, they are just as capable of making a mistake as any other human being.  If scientists are not human then I would like to know what they really are, maybe they are some higher beings in which case we would be coming up with a name other than scientists and would be calling them gods, at which point we would have the ability to say hey gods do exist and these are it.... Being that there has yet to be someone that would actually believe and say that, I am going to stick to the theory that scientists are human and being human means that you are bound to make a mistake.
Anyhow, this wonderful guy on the bus kept at it (I tend to love it when people do that) while he believes there is a heaven and a hell, and that hell is bad and heaven is good, he wanted everyone else to think the same and the only proof to it was "God's word" in this case that meant The Bible.  Humans are so faithful to this book, it is amazing how they don't think about how this book came to be.

1. The Bible was written several centuries ago, by humans nonetheless. I think we have established that human beings are capable of error, therefore believing in the words of this book is to me absolutely illogical. 
2. The Bible was also written in a language that is pretty much dead and then has been translated in I don't even remember how many languages now, by an extreme amount of people (also humans) who have translated it based on what they believe makes the most sense of what they are reading from a language that is not their original language. 
3. After being translated so many different times, the Bible is a book that can be interpreted in so many different ways, which is the reason why there are so many different religions based on that same book, each person read the book and each person decided there was a different way to interpret this book, each came up with their own set of rules and their own view created a new religion based on the same book.
4. To believe that there is only one truth and that you are the only one that holds said truth when there are possibly the same amount of people, if not more, that believe in something slightly different based on that same book is freaking ludicrous! 

I suppose I could list more reasons but really I think these 4 are enough to show that when it comes to religion every person needs to understand that whatever you want to believe in is a personal choice, something that makes sense to you, if someone is looking for their own answers then by all means tell them how you have come up with your own justifications for your beliefs and then let them come up with their own ideas and their own views.  No one has a right answer, not a certain answer and that is ok, the world needs to come to terms to being ok with the fact that the only certainty of life is that is so freaking uncertain. 

On Death and Dying

Today I found myself saying: "It will be fine, in the end I will end up alive and well or dead and finally resting... Either outcome is not a bad one."  And then as the day kept going and I kept running around town getting things done, I started to think how there might be some people that would think of me crazy for saying such a thing, others that would think of me as someone that is extremely negative or just insanely depressed.
The thing is that those words came through to me with a smile on my face and with a weird calmness to it.  I really did not say that (or typed that) in a negative manner, I said it with a sense of feeling that at this moment in time I have no regrets.
I kept thinking how a lot of my friends will say to me that I am young and I should be praying to live another day and to have a long life and blah blah blah... But for me, I only keep asking the universe, God, life, whatever you want to call it, that if I am being continuously granted another day of life, to not allow me to regret anything that happens to me each and every day.  The good, the bad, the ugly... All of it has taught me something, I have learned and grown from each experience and because I have done so I can say at this moment in time with absolute certainty that I have no regrets.
In the past I have done my best with every situation I have been put through, I have given my best to those who I loved and I have said to each of them how much I love them and how grateful I am for them.
There are those with whom I was not able to spend as much time as I wanted to but I learned and accepted that those were things that needed to happen in that way in order for me to grow and learn.  I thought about my grandmother and how she is getting older and sicker, there was a time when I regretted that I am unable to go visit her because there are certain people who are selfish and irrational that have hindered my going to see her.  I used to get really angry at them, but now, there isn't anger, there is acceptance.  The same acceptance I have come to have about the one thing I will never be able to prevent, and that is my death.  We are all going to die, one day, maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe we will be granted more days than we ever could possibly imagine to have, but we will all die.
We are mortals, our physical bodies are finite, and while I go through life adding more things to take care of and more weight over my shoulders that one person could possibly ever bear; I enjoy every single moment of bearing that weight.  I've enjoyed the pain and sorrow, I have enjoyed the anger, the happiness, the moments with the closest of friends, the moments I have cried and was unable to stop. It might sound crazy to say that I've enjoyed the pain, but the truth is that I have, not because of the actual pain but because of what I learned from it.
I've enjoyed each moment of silence, each person that has come and hurt me, and each person that has come and made me smile, each person that has come and left, those who don't seem to be physically around because either they passed away or are far away but that with just one thought I can bring them closer to me even when they don't think I am thinking of them.
I think I have given my best to this life, I have given each person, each situation the savoring that was needed.  And I have faith, I have true faith that things go exactly the way they are supposed to so that the big picture, the end result is true happiness and contentment, with that faith I realize every day that if I was to have to leave this plane of existence today it would be for the best of everyone.
I am ok with thinking this, with knowing this and accepting this, I have found myself ok with living on the right now for 90% of my time, which is a lot given that most humans like to live in the tomorrow rather than in the right now. I am ok with all of this because this has allowed me to not miss out on anything that life has to offer. I have enjoyed the lessons and the happy moments, so how could I possibly ever sit here and ask for more days to live so that I can accomplish more? Instead I ask that if tomorrow I get to get up, I don't forget to live in the now, and I don't forget to enjoy the now at least 90% of the now, to enjoy the pains and the lessons, because the day that I decide to constantly live in the tomorrow and stop living in the today I will become dead while still alive, my soul will then die and that would be worse than physical death.

Life and faith...

I have not actually sat here and blogged about anything lately, life has been as hectic as it can get and more annoying than ever. 

It's kind of hard to get yourself together when you have so many people around you that are counting on you, that see you as something that you don't really feel you are at the moment. 

It is even more annoying not having the time to actually heal from past wounds and at the same time have new ones being caused on you. 

It can be extremely hard finding yourself as the person everyone needs to go to for advice and yet not feeling like you are able to put your things together. 

Some say life is messy, it is possible though that we make it messy.  It is possible that as we go through life we busy ourselves with so many things and then forget that there are things that needed more of our attention. 

Other times we want to trust people, give them a second chance because a part of you felt like that was the right thing to do, and then those people turn around and do what they did before but three times worse than before.  Then life gets messy, but it was not messy, it got messy because you trusted and unfortunately you cannot go through life with distrust. We all need to have some level of trust of others, but unfortunately even when we trust the bare minimum we can still get hurt, we can get burned.

I can always count on my good friend karma to come to the rescue when things like that happen to me, when people that are given a second chance just completely turn around and mess up again, when I make life messy because I keep on trusting and giving the second chances.

And when that happens, when that blow comes towards you, it is easy to distrust, to lose faith and to thing that life is messy, that is not that life is made messy but people but that it is naturally messy. It's hard to remind ourselves that human beings are the ones that are naturally selfish and that because of that they tend to make this life messy. That our own selfishness is what causes us to not live in peace and tolerance of others, because it is our selfishness that makes us stubborn and unwilling to see when we have made a mistake. 

But life is is about having faith that even when you have created a mess or someone has brought mess into your life that as long as you leave that selfish part of you to the side that you will be able to see how life has a way of cleaning things up and making them right, rather than making them even messier. 

It takes a while to see it, it takes a while to start to trust again in something bigger, something you cannot see or have proof of its existence, some people don't even get there, but I think that if we just put our trust in humans, just in ourselves... The ones that are constantly making mistakes and that half the time don't even know what the hell they want. Those who hurt with words and actions, the ones that come in to your life to hurt you and then leave, the ones who say they will do certain things and then either do the opposite or do nothing at all and end up breaking promises. 

Why would I ever trust in people, in the selfishness of people? There are very few that are not like that and those are really hard to find, I wish they weren't but keeping to themselves is the only way they won't get as hurt. 

Those that are not as selfish are the loners, the ones that don't ask for anything when they help others, the ones that don't want the glory after helping someone, the ones that don't throw it in their faces after having helped someone... They are hard to find because they don't fit in the world we live in, it is easier for them to get hurt because they want to see the good in people.  Eventually they tend to close themselves up and not say much, the war against the ones that hurt turns into a pointless thing, it becomes a waste of energy because the reality is that there are more selfish people than there are unselfish ones. 

So I trust and have faith that there is something greater than humans, that there is one thing that we don't understand or see, that helps those who have been intentionally and undeservingly hurt. Maybe it does not really exist, maybe because I can't find proof I am irrational in believing in it but we are all irrational. We believe in someone we don't know only because they have a title, we believe in pictures even though they can be easily manipulated, we believe and trust in our family because we think that they will always have our best interest at heart.  All of it is irrational, we have no reason to trust, we don't know if they are lying or not, we never know if they are plotting something, we don't know their intentions, we can never really know who they are, yet we trust in them only because we can see them.

So why not trust in something that is all good and that has our best interest at its hands even when we don't see that what has happened is actually good for us at the moment that it happens.  Why not create it? why not just believe in its existence and give myself some hope that all of it has a purpose, because if it doesn't have one then why do it? 

I wish people were different, I wish that everyone could live in peace and harmony. I wish there were less bad and more good done for everyone's sake, but that is something I might not get to see in this particular plane of existence, all I can really do is change myself and accept that I can't change the world.

On pain and suffering...

Woke up today to a message from one of my cousins, she had sent me the link to one of Kirk Cameron's documentaries, in the message she stated that it was a must watch and that she could not have said it better than the way he put it.
I decided to watch the one hour documentary which attempts to answer questions like: why do bad things happen to good people?, why doesn't God stop pain and suffering?, why there is death and sickness when there is supposedly a God that can stop all of it?, why doesn't God cure everyone?, and more questions among those lines.... eventually we get to the selfish question that every human being on this planet asks themselves when things are not going their way which is WHY ME?
Yes, yes I called you all selfish, the reality is that we all are, we are born that way because really when you think about it if we weren't we would not be able to survive, a baby wants food when it wants food and the baby cannot be told I am sorry you must wait because I have things to do, if you do that then the baby will cry bloody murder, why? Because the baby naturally and instinctively knows that it needs to eat in order to survive. However, as the years pass by we learn to not be as selfish, we learn to help others and we learn to love unconditionally, not love because we need something from another person but because it is a good feeling to just love. Now, some will argue that because we get a good feeling from loving then that also puts us in the selfish pile vs the non-selfish one, and yeah you can look at it that way but that is not something I will argue on this post.
So, I am sitting there watching this documentary and listening to Mr. Cameron pretty much recite the Bible, which he, as many Christians do, confuses the words written in them with the word of God. For the purpose of this particular post I am not go into a lot of arguments as to why that is not true but let me just say that:
1. The Bible was written by men, humans, let's say God did spoke to them and this is assuming God does exist (and I am not saying I don't believe God does) humans tend to interpret things and have the ability to change words to fit their own agenda.
2. Let's say that the words of the Bible are the words of God and God really did write this book, well the original one was written in a language that a lot of the people on earth do not understand and therefore it has had to be translated to many languages by many different people. In essence that book is merely a philosophical book which can give some answers to certain questions we as human posit that we have not been able to answer in any other way.

With that said... Let me continue...

Mr. Cameron starts with how the earth was created, how men were created, which as much as I like to go with what the Bible states and how God created this earth, there are just a lot of questions that are raised that the Bible does not explain, questions that each of us must answer on our own because really in the end all we can do is speculate. He tells us how Adam was supposed to protect Eve and how he failed in doing that because all he did was just watch Eve eat from the "forbidden" tree and did nothing to stop her, statements in which he seems to completely take the blame out of Eve and just put it on Adam. So, I guess it's Adam's fault we are all here living in misery right?
Well then he states how God, his God is all loving and forgiving, yet... God still kicks Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden and tells them now they will not live forever, on that note... even though God is all just, he also decides that it will not just be Adam and Eve that pay for their "wrong doing" (who would have thought that eating an apple would create such havoc) but every single human being will go ahead and have to pay for what they did.... Now that is like saying someone came to your door and killed someone you loved and then not only do we put away the person that committed the crime but we also condemn everyone else on this earth for the same crime even though they did not committed it. Now he does add that God is still just and caring and loving because he dresses Adam and Eve in animal fur when they become ashamed of being naked, later he adds that maybe it was God that said well you are acting like beasts (since they did not obey him) and now you will be dressed like ones... I understand that  that is Mr. Cameron's view but you can't have it both ways, someone so "perfect" as you seem to believe that God is cannot be both unforgiving and forgiving at the same time, you can be just and unjust, I mean really? Is this what they do when they talk about the Gospel?

He continues on with the story of Noah, and the Tower of Babel, and Abraham and as touching as it was to see him think about all of this because a family that seems to be close to him ended up losing their son to cancer after their child had been battling it for 10 years, he still is unable to really answer the question and instead most of the time he is just babbling about God and all the things he tried to do to make sure that we were taken care of and eventually lift ourselves to the heavens.

Here is the thing, when it comes to these kinds of questions of why does pain and suffering exist, unfortunately as much as we want to try and explain it with a collection of books written centuries ago, we really can't, the book tells stories about pain and suffering, most of which is caused by none other than us. Yes at the end Mr. Cameron states that we all have a purpose, one thing we have to fulfill, that life is a big theater production in which God is the Director, Producer, Screen Writer, etc... And we are mere actors, there is a philosophical text on this particular notion and it made a bit of sense especially since we really are not in control of our lives, everything we do is dependent on someone else, whether that someone else is someone closer to you or not, every decision you make in life, its outcome is not dependent just on you but on someone else because we don't live in this world alone.

So why does pain and suffering exist? We suffer because we want to, we suffer because we get attached to things, to people, suffering is a human emotion, pain is earthly not heavenly, we can say that God is not perfect because he created a world that is imperfect, so how can a perfect God create an imperfect world? A world full of suffering and pain? Change the view of the world you are seeing, the world itself is perfect, each of us was given the ability to choose and the ability to think and act the way we see it best, and each of us was created differently from one another therefore each of us will have different views and different ideas. It is because we are all created so differently that this world is not one bit of boring, we are here to learn and I agree that everything that we go through teaches us all a lesson each situation is different and therefore each lesson is different and yes I could sit here and talk all about what I have learned in the hope that you will learn it too and maybe live a happier life but if you are not willing to learn it by listening to someone else then if it is a lesson you must learn life itself or God will put you in a similar situation in order for you to learn your own lessons, some decide that they will learn others decide that they will not.

And going back to pain and suffering being an earthly thing... Have you ever just stepped back for a moment and really thought about all the other things that were going on in your life that were actually good? Life always sends good things to us, but as humans we are so self-destructive that when we see something good happening we believe we either don't deserve it or that suffering will eventually come from it and eventually it ends up happening because we expect it and then we find a reason to suffer. Whether it is that your job sucks, that you don't have enough money, that you are not healthy enough, that you might find out that you are going to have to battle a deadly disease (and on that note let me remind you all that life is deadly, we all end up in a grave eventually so saying deadly disease is kind of dumb) but we all always find something to complain about, something always sucks and when we focus on everything that sucks for us we tend to drown ourselves in this bubble of negativity which in turn clouds us and stops us from seeing the amazing things we have in life and we become ungrateful and intolerant of others and that in turn creates a lot of chaos in the world. It is not until the day that each of us starts to see life in a different way that pain and suffering will end, every single person on this planet must come to the acceptance that we are not alone and that we have to not just preach tolerance but practice it and I am sorry to tell you but not many people practice tolerance. And back to acceptance, we must accept that this world we live in, is perfect, a world where everyone would agree with everyone else would just be plain boring, a world where everyone was created equal would be extremely boring, a world where there were no "bad" things happening would be a depressing world because then how would we know what the happy and good things were? A world where sickness did not exist would not allow us to appreciate the times when we are healthy, those times that we often take for granted. A world where there was no death would not teach us to appreciate the moments we have now, even though most times we don't appreciate it and it tends to be the times when we completely stop appreciating those beautiful moments we have with close friends, family, nature that we get reminded that life is short and that death can come at any time so you might as well enjoy it.

Being Grateful

And so it happened that after being away from one of my social media websites I went in just to check on a message I had been sent and a wonderful friend had tagged me on a status, the idea was that he was nominating 3 people to write 3 things they are grateful for each day for 5 days.
And yes it did not mean I had to do it, but you know what I figured hey! It's a great idea and a great exercise especially since as humans we have the tendency to complain about things and look at them in such a negative perspective that we forget that some things we complain about we can change and the ones that we can't change are probably there as a lesson we must learn whether we want to or not, therefore it should not really be a big deal right?
As I started thinking about three things I was grateful for yesterday, I realized that I just kept adding to my list, there were not just three things I had in mind but several of them, and possibly this happens to me because I am just an avid thinker and if someone gets my mind started on something I just keep on going, so I figured I would make a slightly larger list and would actually make this list about things most people are rarely thankful for because they see those things as negative things and they tend to have a concept of a Utopian society that if existed would probably be extremely boring and in a way possibly depressing.
So here I go:

1. I am thankful for each person that has come into my life and intentionally hurt me somehow.
   Each of those persons, while they did some damage they also taught me a few lessons, lessons that had they not hurt me the way they did I would not have learned. Thanks to them I have learned how to spot good people, it was not easy but I learned there are certain things people who are out for themselves always do and say that those who are not don't do. Learning the difference has really helped me improved my life and taught me that it is not about how many people you have around but about the quality of the people you have around and when you get rid of the bad people, the ones that are left (even though they are not too many) make life even better! They have also taught me to be thankful for the few good people I have around, they made those people even more important and more valuable to me and that alone has increased the level of gratefulness towards those few good people, so much so that it seems I keep attracting them somehow and keep getting rid of the bad ones. 
2. I am thankful for sickness.
   Yes, why would anyone be thankful for that right? Well, let me tell you one thing about sickness... Anytime I've gotten sick it has been because I am working myself too much and I've learned that it is my body's way of saying "hello!!! you need to step back and relaxed a little" it is when I don't listen that things get worse. Today my little one woke up without a voice and coughing, I had a sore throat, the first thing I wanted to do (which is usually what the first thing most people do when they don't feel good) is complain, why ohh why am I getting sick and my daughter is getting sick after just one week of school and when I have so much stuff to do, meanwhile all I really want to do is go lay down in bed and sleep it off... Then it hit me, I needed to slow down a bit, she needed to slow down a bit, we both have been in this different way of living and just going along our lives on our own time throughout the summer and now we have to adjust to the schedule that is set not by us but by other people and the adjustment will take a little bit of time, and it's ok, it's ok to just take a small break, better to take a break than to get even sicker. Not only this but sickness reminds me of the times I am healthy and reminds me to enjoy those times even more, same when I hear about other people's sickness, it reminds me that it could be worse, it reminds me that I am not invincible, that I am a mere mortal and whether or not I feel like crap my job is to enjoy life as much as I can even when I am really not enjoy it much. 
3. I am thankful for the struggles that life has given me.
   Yep, I am definitely thankful for that, the struggles I've been through have taught me to see life in a different way. They have taught me how uncertain life is and therefore have allowed me to live a life where even if I plan certain things when things don't go as planned (and 99.9% of the time they really don't go as planned) I don't dwell on them too much while most people do, we want certainty in a world that is completely uncertain. We all want that, we want to be certain of things even though we know that there are no guarantees... ok there is one guarantee, you are guarantee to die, but you don't know when, where or how, everything else is not guaranteed, everything else depends not just on your decisions but on the decisions of billions of other people that live in this planet and are (I believe) connected to one another. So yes, I am thankful for life's struggles, they've taught me to live with less anger and less stress and to prioritize things in a way that most people don't.
4. I am thankful for death.
   Death is often seen as something so negative, especially when it happens to someone young and that has not "lived" to what most people would call a full life. The thing is that as I stated above, death is guaranteed for everyone, whether we believe it as a reality or not, the concept of someone dying and passing on is the same for everyone and it will happen to everyone. My acceptance of death and that it can come at any time reminds me to live life too, whether things are going great or they are not going so great, knowing and accepting that I can die at any time has made me see life in general and the life of others in a completely different way, a way that I've come to painfully realize that the majority of people (especially people my age) don't really accept because they are stuck on the believe and hope that they will be alive tomorrow and the next day and the day after for many many years to come. Some even create anxieties about dying and go about their lives worrying about the things they do that might kill them so instead of living they are pretty much dead before they actually die. The older generation though, most of them, and psychologically you get to the age when you accept that death will come and so that's when they actually start living each day, yes they have their complaints but they come to an understanding that life is limited and so they worry less about certain things like debts and actual things, but most tend to always go back and express with regret how much they wished they would not have put so much emphasis on those things back when they were my age because then their lives would  have been fuller. Even when you read about what is something that most people regret while they are dying it all comes down to the things that we as young adults believe we have to put so much emphasis on right now that we forget all the actual important things that we should be doing. 
5. I am thankful for debt.
   Yes, yes, WHAT? Most people want to get out of debt, they really just don't want to be in debt at all. But see we live in a society where we have been taught that we have to borrow money in order to buy certain things that we "must have" we get into extremes amount of debt, as students we use loans to pay our way through school, then we get out of school and we are worried about how the heck we will pay those loans. We complain about the loans, we complain about the car payment, we complain about the mortgage payment, the credit card bills... the list goes on. But what we don't realize is that for every single dollar we have ever borrowed we have actually acquired something we wanted at the particular point in time that we had acquire the debt, whether it was our education, or the new car or the house, but we wanted those things. Even if we say ohh hey I got debt for hospital bills, well you went to the hospital because you wanted to get healthy. Or I got into a lot of debt because things broke down in my house or my car, or some sort of natural disaster happened, still you wanted to fix those things that you originally wanted and with those things that you acquire comes a greater sense of responsibility because now you have more things to take care of. Anyway... to my point, debt has taught me to live a simpler life. There was a point in my life where I could walk into any store and I would get a huge credit line because I made enough money and I had excellent credit, but then shit happened and everything was lost in a manner of days, it all went to hell so I was forced to live a simpler life. The simpler life is not a life that most of the people around me are ok with and therefore is a constant battle to get them to stop telling me that I need this or I need that but... It has been worth it to me, and had it not been for debt and the complains of others about their debt, I would not be able to live simply and work towards memories rather than work for things. It really is freeing when you think about it. 
6. I am grateful for injustice.
   Yes, yes, I might be completely insane on that one, how can one be grateful for that right? Well... Let me tell you something, without injustice I would not know or enjoy those times when something just happens. And even though in my view of things each person has a slightly different concept of what justice is and the "reality" is that deep down we all have a collective concept of what justice is, and that concept changes as we evolve as a society which is why most times we can't even define what justice is, we tend to give examples of what it is, but we would not have those examples if we did not have examples of injustice.

So there... I am sure there are more things I could think about that most people would want to completely get rid of and do without because hey, they are not so good things for them and therefore would never think about being grateful for them but there is always something that those things teach us and the lessons we learn are part of the life we are living right now and one should never be ungrateful of the lessons we learn. In the end that is what we are here for, to learn, and the more that we fight the learning experiences the more we will be put in situations where we will be forced to learn those lessons, the harder we will make our lives and the more grateful you are for the things that happen to you the more positive you will begin to see your life...

Knowledge...

Issue at hand is whether or not we can achieve knowledge...
First of I suppose we need to figure out what we mean by knowledge? If I go by the dictionary's definition of knowledge then knowledge is acquaintance of facts, truths, or principles as from study or investigation.
And I think I will go ahead and just use that one definition of knowledge for the purpose of this blog because the question here is whether or not we can actually have knowledge, and based on that definition the answer would be yes, we can... however, is what we know as a fact or truth actually true?
In order for us to get to a "fact" first someone has to have had some perception of what they believed they could eventually prove as "factual" however, we tend to put so much energy and so much weight into the "facts" as we know them right now and create arguments to try and prove something is true forgetting that the "facts" we are using are just simple theories with, to put it simply, a lot of backing at the particular moment in time but nonetheless they are just theories.
Theories which can turn a simple conversation into a full blown and scary fight, the reality is that even though we can back a theory to the point of us calling it a fact so that we make ourselves feel better and give each other a bit of certainty, that is still just a theory, and the justifications we have used to be able to call it a fact can change at any point in time.
That is one of the reasons why we can never be certain of anything really, not even our own knowledge of things. Taking it one step further... In order for any of us to actually attain any "knowledge" we have to first be able to perceive something, in perceiving things each of use can have a different view of that particular something. All the "knowledge" we have was once someone else's perception, someone else who decided to call whatever it is we are perceiving whatever name it has. This goes even to any studies, we have a group of scientists who are following certain parameters in order to prove certain theories and then call those theories a fact. But the parameters that they are following, the rules one might say, were set up by someone else, someone that is not them, but that somehow got us to take those rules and use them as basis for any scientific study, and unless we look at how they came up with those parameters and actually are able to ask them what made them come up with this set of of rules (which really we cannot) we cannot possibly say with certainty that this is the best way, it is the best way that was adopted years ago and we just kept going with it.
And let's just say that way was in fact the correct way of proving theories as "facts" then those who are actually in charge of whatever "study" are writing their findings based on their perception of things, unless we are actually there, we cannot conclude with certainty that what they perceive is 100% correct, even if there was another group of people conducting a study in the same manner we cannot say that their findings are completely based on just their perception, we can argue that because there were a group of people who had done research on the same subject before that their perception of what they are working on might be skewed.
The point I guess I am trying to get to here is that it does not matter how much "proof" one has for a particular thing to be real or not real, that "proof" can change at any time, that "proof" is also based on someone's perception, a person or group of people who we don't know and could be essentially perceiving the world in such a different way than what we would perceive but yet they have found enough convincing evidence to make the argument that what they saw have made this theory of theirs a fact. And most times we don't even question it. We take it for what it is, we don't think about it, we just go with it. Our need for certainty, in a world where things are really extremely uncertain tends to lead us to believe things that are sometimes completely false. If we were to really think about this, it would lead us to the point where we would realize that we really don't know anything, and maybe that is a scary thing for the world to realize, to actually think about, we know it, we know that all we have is knowledge based on someone else's perceptions and we go on trusting that their perception will align with ours if we were to go ahead and follow what they followed to arrive to the conclusion they have and make that particular theory a fact, but the truth is that we don't know, and we can't find out, we just have to trust and if we don't trust in it then it becomes a really scary thing to think that what we know and claim certainty for is not really certain, which is what leads me to believe even more so in faith, whether it is on a higher power that is invisible and that is all mighty and powerful or whether it is on another human being, a group of people who have found a way to convince a significant amount of people that their theories are true.... And even when we find out that what we knew before and we thought of as an actual fact turns out by new evidence that was wrong we really don't think anything of it, we still keep everything else as certain, set in stone as some will put it, without the ability to change at all and therefore we assume and proclaim that it is the absolute truth, we don't leave the leeway that we should in order to learn to tolerate the beliefs of others, whether they can be proven or not, it might just mean that they can't be proven right now, but does not mean that they can't be "proven" in the future, nor does it mean that if it is "proven" in the future that later we won't learn something new and realize that what we "proved" was wrong.
So, can we ever achieve knowledge? Personally because knowledge is based on someone else's perception I don't think we can, but then again the more I think about it, the more I realize that we really don't know anything, it is that we think we know something that lead us to terrible arguments about what we think we know rather than wonderful conversations that could lead us to a different degree of understanding of each other. But hey! What do I know right? I just said we really don't know anything...

Because everyone just keeps talking about it...

For the past few days people have been bombarding the talk about suicide and depression. I've read many different articles that were written just after the passing of the dear comedian Robin Williams, everyone saying how we just don't know how much pain someone is in, he was someone who dedicated his life to making other people laugh and yet he somehow could not make himself happy. 

I've read an extreme amount of articles on addiction and depression and mental illness. All of which appear sometimes to be three different things and others they appear to be looked at as the same thing but with different names. 

People keep pointing out that if you are starting to feel sad or depressed you should reach out to someone and talk, the national suicide line phone number has now become a constant post that appears on every post about Robin's death.

And while I believe that is great to bring awareness, I also think that we are all missing one big point here which I mentioned on my last post, and that is that we are all living in a world that fosters feelings of depression. 

We live in a society where we are bombarded by sad news, depressing news all the time, what makes it to the news are the guy who stabbed his whole family because he says that was his destiny, the woman who threw her newborn down a cliff, the war that is going on between two countries (a war that has been going on for many many years), the beheading of children because they are of a different religion.  How can someone not get depressed when we are constantly reading or hearing stuff like this. 

Then you add the ideals that society has set as standards for living a full and happy life. Standards like you must have a house, you must buy a nice car, you must get an education, you must get married, you must make this kind of money, you must have good health, you must keep a certain amount of money in the bank, you are only successful when you keep moving up the corporate ladder, etc etc... A society that has the standard that says: everyone has to be the same but at the same time everyone must be different.

Have you ever stopped and think about how fucking hard that is? You have to follow certain guidelines which, as society says, will bring you happiness, and we go on and work on dreams that other people have had, we work so hard to get to that next step, to have the money in the bank, to have the family, to buy the house and yet when we get all of it we are still unhappy because the reality is that that was not really what we wanted to do in the first place. We put so much work and we stress out over the things we have not yet achieved and that society says we should have achieved by a certain age that we forget about what we really want. 

We listen to what our parents and peers have to say on how they've lived their life and we think because it worked for them (even when we see that they are not really happy) that it will work for us. We forget about what we want and we give more importance to the voices of other people rather than our own, and when we finally realize this it is either too late or we end up feeling alone in the world because we decide to do things differently and everyone else has decided to judge us. 

We are also living on a society who has been completely disconnected from human relationships, human contact, we no longer know how to read someone's body language because we are not around anyone to actually practice reading that. Our instincts that once would tell us that someone was in trouble or in pain are not being used anymore and therefore we are losing the capacity to go and help someone before they actually come to us and ask for help. 

Think about this... I don't know if it is true but reports state that Robin Williams wife left the house without seeing him that morning because she thought he was still sleeping, on a different room nonetheless. I keep wondering what would have happened if she would have walked in his room before leaving the house and actually checked up on him, not that I am blaming her because it's not her fault but what would have happened if we were more connected with each other rather than with devices?

We live in a society that has stopped listening because we are too busy reading and thinking that we can have 20 different conversations at the same time, we ignore the people we are surrounded by and that are right in front of us because others are trying to catch our attention. We decide that we will go ahead and use a text message to speak to someone we care about while we are also working or doing other stuff that does not allow us to actually stop for one moment grab the phone and talk. Basically we live in a society that gives less importance to people and more importance to things. 

So how can we be so astounded when we see that the rates of depression and suicide among Americans are rapidly rising through the years, we have done this, we have created this! How many of you actually put your phones away or actually listen to someone talk anymore... I get irritated because most of my friends now find it easier to text than they do to talk and it always feels when a conversation is not continuous (because that is what happens when you are texting, you get distracted and stop the subject and then try to pick it up later) like it is not important for any of them to actually take the time and stop to talk, yet here we all are asking everyone to speak up when we don't even want to give the time needed to listen. 

This society has also been teaching us that we must be strong, that we must get over things, especially things that society has classified as silly, even though things affect people in different ways, we expect everyone to react in the same manner to the same situation. The most ridiculous thing that I have yet to experience, not everyone is the same and while we hear that over and over we still expect everyone to be. And while it is true that you cannot help someone who does not want to be helped, it is also true that you cannot tell someone who is seeking help that they are seeking help for something that to you is silly because to them it is not.

We live in a world that judges us for the emotions we feel and that we show and yet that same world that laughs at us for what it believes is a silly thing our minds have created is now calling out for us to speak up and tell it when we don't feel right. That same world that has become a playground where everyone plays on their own and where everyone ignores everyone is now telling us that we need to speak up because it is ready to listen. 

The worst part of all of this is that this great awareness that has been created over the suicide of someone who lived to make others laugh but was apparently very sad inside will start to fade out in the next few days, and suddenly everyone will go back to their old lives and keep running towards things that will not matter when you die. They will continue to ignore and will continue make things a priority. They will go back to being unhappy and pretending that they are, they will go back to making fun of others' emotions until once again someone that touched so many lives will do the same and then the talk will be reopen, but it will all just be talk because not many will actually change their ways. 

I truly wish we could all sit back and accept how different we are from one another, how our differences is what makes this world so perfect, I wish we could all realize that the set standards that society has given us will not make everyone happy, it might make some happy but not all. I wish we had the courage to go after our dreams and not after someone else's, following our dreams and our hearts will always fill us with light. I wish people wouldn't judge others and cut their wings when they decide that they are going to take a leap of faith and follow that dream that everyone said would be really hard to achieve. I wish we could all fill our void not with worry but with faith, and most of all I wish we paid more attention to the people in our lives rather than the devices that surround us. Maybe if we did that, we would find less people depressed and more people happy. 

Perfection is about Perception.

I think I have probably said this one before, perfection is all about perception. What is perfect for you it's more than likely not perfect for someone else and vice-versa.  Unfortunately the world we live in is ran by the idea that what is perfect for most should be the guideline for perfection for everyone and in the end if that guideline cannot be achieved by one of us then we are told: "well, nothing is perfect."

So, wait? Does perfection really exists?

Yes, it does, and yes, it is all about your perception of things. To me, the world itself is a perfect place, you could not make it any more perfect. WHAT? Yes, I know, there are wars, there are things we consider unfair, yes people argue, yes people kill others, yes sometimes we look at the world and think everything is not fair when it should be so we say: the world is not perfect. But there is where my perception comes into place... See without any of the "bad" things that happen in the world, I would be less appreciative of the "good" things that happen in the world and in that same regard if the "bad" things did not happen then I would have no idea of what a "good" thing is, so to me the two go together and while I do get upset and angry to some of the "unfair" things that happen, I also know that I wouldn't appreciate it as much when I saw "fair" things happen.

What about people? Are people perfect? 

Again this all comes to a matter of your perception, and on that note: Everyone is fucking perfect!!! All of you are perfect!!! WHAT??? In my perception of things, every person in this planet has a role, no life is useless even the ones whose life we think are, even that mass murderer has a purpose. We all come here to learn something, and in order for each of us to learn we have to be put through different scenarios in life, and all those scenarios would not be possible without other people, even the "bad" people.

That's why some of us are born to parents who according to societal rules are far from perfect and that should have never been parents in the first place but they somehow became parents and we were lucky to have them and then as we grow older we figure out what exactly our role is gonna be, some end up making themselves better parents, others end up becoming criminals or drug addicts when they attempt to figure out the why oh why life was like that... And with either circumstance our soul learns what it needs to learn (at least I sure hope it does, otherwise it is believed that it will keep coming through the same scenarios until it does). 

There are others who are born to what society will call "excellent" parents, and then just like those lucky to have been born to parents that should have never been parents, they have to figure out what their role is, some end up becoming drug addicts or criminals because they think they have to be like their parents, just as "perfect" or the idea of perfection that their parents have created, while others end up being what society calls "well-balanced" and "emotionally healthy" human beings.  Either way each side and those in between have something to learn. Which is why I say: We are all perfect!!! All of us, our differences make us perfect!

This is what brings me to this question, one that came up yesterday: why is it that people suffer with the idea that they can never be perfect? Everyone is always looking for the perfect relationship, to build the perfect marriage, to raise the perfect kids, have the perfect house and in the end they all end up disappointed with the idea that nothing is perfect when truly we already are perfect! (And I know some will say well if we were then we wouldn't need to learn things, well... that is part of our perfection, we are beings who are always learning and that makes us even more perfect, otherwise we would just be boring know-it-alls and if everyone knew everything then this world would be just plain boring and in my perception of things boring is just not perfect...)

We suffer with the idea that we will never be perfect because we have been taught from the moment we are born of what perfection is, and when it is not achieved we are told: don't worry about it, nothing is perfect. And so then we repeat that to ourselves until we believe it and then just try to learn with it, or we end up depressed because we can never achieve perfection, it's impossible. See, here is the thing I've learned, because perfection is about perception, you have to leave behind the perception of the rest of the world around you, your parents included, and this is one of the hardest things you will ever do! and then you have to figure out what is perfect for you, what will work for you, what will make YOU happy, and then go out and do that, and whatever everyone else says it's just their opinion and not one you should follow unless you absolutely want to. 

Once you figure out what perfect is to you, you might end up realizing that you have spent a shit load of time trying to be the perfect of someone else's standards. All your relationships suddenly become something that either you would have never entered into had it not been for the illusion of perfection of someone else or something you would have never left and would have worked harder to make it work had it not been because it wasn't someone else's idea of perfection. This also applies for jobs and everything you do in life in general. For someone it might be perfect that you go and pick a major that you don't necessarily love or want a job in but that will land you a good paying job once you graduate and that's just perfect for them, but it does not mean it will be perfect for you, you might end up landing that "great" job with "great" benefits and pay but you won't feel fulfilled and it will suck, at which time you will wonder if you did the right thing or not, but let me tell you something... If you are not happy then you did not do the right thing.

Same goes with trying to get the perfect house, raising the perfect kids, perfect marriage, who the hell decided to put in writing what exactly a perfect marriage is? For some they have the perfect marriage with someone they only spend 5% of time at peace with and the other 95% of the time they spend arguing and trying to fix the problems that arise every day and for others they find it that it is perfect for them to have a marriage where no one is arguing and everyone agrees on everything. Which one you choose is really up to you and no one else. But it is not until we actually figure out what our ideal of perfection without the ideal of perfection of others (and if I am forced to put it in different words: what will bring us happiness and joy to our lives without the input of others) that we will actually be able to change our perception of the "perfect" world and begin to walk in the path that will lead to our ultimate happiness, it will be then that we can begin to accept ourselves of how we are and we can begin to live a little more freely and with less stress and more joy.