I dreamed of something this morning that had me thinking about it being a part of the stuff I experienced in the first xxx trip I did a week ago. It had to do with eyesight and the way I saw things during that first trip. Something happens there I need to remember or reconstruct for sure. I didn't remember the dream content when I got outta bed. As far as I'm concerned, this sacrament has produced some of the most useful experience or gnowing I have encountered. I don't gnow what that means yet, but there are residuals of what I experienced with xxx that has lingered in noticeable ways. I think it has something to do with peripheral comprehension. I'm pretty sure that's what I was involved with in this morning's dreams. I'm thinking it's the kind of stuff that shows up in delta consciousness rather than the more hypnogogic REM dream material. At one point, I lay in bed zombied out. By zombied out I mean that I lay in one position without moving for a long period of time (maybe an hour in earth time). Time was obviated and all I experienced during that period introduced extra-ordinary content difficult to describe. The entire time I 'saw' no object possessed by an individual nature, but was enveloped in a misty neon haze similar to a city scene when there is fog downtown and the neon lights seem to fuse with the mist and present amazing halos in the mist that surrounds them. A glowing light. That's all I "saw" during this period.

There was something else going on. I wasn't alone.

I appeared to be having a type of conversation with my true self about my real feelings in regard to various events that transpired during my waking state. That data in waking beta is compiled to set and setting historically. What I experienced in this state was comparatively raw, undefined data, and yet it was code (hex?). This machine level language evidenced itself in this intimate conversation with my "self". I write that in full awareness that I am not a computer programmer, and I don't write computer code, and yet this seems like an apt, yet possibly erroneous metaphor. This solitary discussion had to do with detecting the concealed truth hidden behind the ordinary modality of data perceived in the sensory fashion. The socially constructed language we use is so restrictive. The conversation seemed like some sort of negotiation between the values of the 3D world of the sensory modalities, and the inherent value of the same uncompiled machine language data set. Does translation of the physical machine level code to our native language function as a compiler for raw modality input?

The sensory-perceived data appeared so flimsy, so incomplete and so unfulfilling that it performs like a rather tasty appetizer or salad without the filet mignon or dessert to finish the meal to satiation. Or, perhaps like expecting the menu itself to provide the sustanance of a consumed meal. The nature of this sacrament is definitely about... Communion. This communion took place between what I call "me" and what I call the Witness. This name-calling is totally senseless.

Something vital is ordinarily omitted during this process.

On the other hand, the fullness of the primaeval data was such that it made comprehension of logical order absolutely impossible. It came streaming at me through the foveal (societally-ordered) vision so indomitably and with such lack of restraint that I could not make heads or tails of it. Unpolarized information. Impossible to "think" about. It came at me relentlessly while I was laying there on the bed. If I picked out one section of it for analysis and froze it through polarization, the situation became inanely ridiculous. I would find myself completely out of flow and soon realize I was laying in my bed letting this sacrament have it's way with me. Subsequently, I would find myself fascinated and attracted to the flow again and thus experiencing content that could not be picked apart and reunified through it's parts. It was like an All... or no thing paradigm over which I had little power over.

These two variations of comprehension was what was being negotiated. What was at stake was a balance point of values. I couldn't "make sense" of the stream of primaeval data experienced during flow, nor could I experience flow if I attempted to "make sense" of the data by dissembling it. By "make sense" I mean to indicate some ritual of polarization, segueing into interpreting the value of the the constructed polarized opposites in the physical world system of ideation and projection.

The "balance point" exists in such a way that I could, hopefully, receive the primaeval data very briefly and then attempt to "make sense" of it briefly. Having my attention pulled into the event horizon of the source of the primaeval data queered the deal, just as easily as attempting to categorize and analyse too big a portion of it. It seemed as if I had to jump a fence to graze the grassthat was greener on the other side, and then hop back over the fence to chew it. If I took too long to graze I blew it, and if I chewed my cud too long I blew it. Like in Goldilocks and the Three Bears, my timing had to be "just right".

I just got through cooking a whole pound of bacon. I became very happy while I was cooking that bacon. I knew that I was gone cook that bacon just the way I like it. What I didn't realize was how long that was going to take. Frying up bacon the way I like it takes a surprisingly long time. I guess that's because I'm so parsnickity about wanting crisply fried bacon. When I say crisp I mean every part of the bacon slice. I don't like no pooches of unfried fat poking up like a while whale. I literally quit eating in restaurants because I didn't like the way they cooked it. Ordering bacon for breakfast at a restaurant is sometime equivalent to ordering heated fat. I ain't no Eskimo, and I live in temperate climate. Ugh!

The biggest reason I haven't cooked my own bacon very much is because of the way I have lived on the run. I always traveled. I didn't live no one location for very long. Staying somewhere for two years would end up driving me crazy and I usually found myself creating whatever sort of diversion it took to find an excuse to fly. I liked to go on the bum and hitch-hike all around the country for months at a time, and even the trade I finally mastered forced me to travel to get work. The type of industrial structures that require the services of my trade were usually huge industrial complexes like refineries, power plants, chemical and pharmaceutical complexes costing tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. Those kinds of industries don't get build just anywhere. Many times they are built in some fairly isolated places because of the danger of chemical leaks and/or explosions. So, the construction crowd that builds these sorts of edifices move around the country a lot. They get paid a fairly good wage for doing it, so while technically it is migrant labor, the wages can run close six figures a year if you're lucky enough to get enough work throughout the entire year. These highly skilled people are sometime referred to as 'road trash' by the locals of the communities they invade. I did belong to what's called a company union when I first learned to weld at a big shipyard in Mississippi. But, once I went on the road and started working construction jobs I didn't keep my ties with the union. I liked working non-union jobs. Getting a non-union job is a totally different proposition than being in a local branch of a national union. In the first place it's every man for himself. Getting and keeping the job was totally up to me. I had no advocate other than what wit and grit I could muster up to get along with people and perform the work skillfully enough to satisfy the man. There are some groups or crews who travel together and use their personal ties to help each other get jobs. Usually these crews were run by a strong leader who usually worked in the administrative or supervisory team. Some times it was a family thing with the majority of the crew being kinfolk of some kind. It could exist as a fairly secure situation because they stuck together politically and if you took on one of them you took all of them on. Somehow, I never did fall in with one of these groups. I liked to go to these remote places not knowing anybody who lived there or even know any of the people with whom I would be working. I like being a stranger in a strange land. It allows me to become anybody I want to portray, and as a stranger, nobody could prove the personality I pulled out of my hat was for real or not. What they perceived when I unloaded my tool box was all they had to go on, and that was more than just fine with me, it was the joy of my existence.

It just didn't work with my marriages. I would leave our bed in the mornings, go out and become someone completely different than the person I was the day before, and by the time I came back that night, not only did my wives insist that I become the person who left home that morning, but insisted that I stay that way until I could escape the next morning with a new voice inflection and a fresh look about my eyes to become a completely new creation just to see if I could make it work and get strangers to accept my creation without suspicion. During my hitch-hiking I got into a lot of cars with a lot of different people, and sometime ride with them for hours or even days of constant conversation. I might average spending some appreciable amount of one-on-one face time with forty or more different people a week for months at a time. How could I not imitate each one of them to at least some degree? The most fun for me is to watch various careactors mix and match to suit completely unpredictable situations without incurring blame. My wives wanted me to stay the particular persona that won their affection, but for me it was just a passing fancy. I hardly ever read the same book twice.

The bacon I was frying come in a package that stated that it was thick sliced bacon. When I opened the packaging I saw that there wasn't much lean meat in it. It wasn't sliced thick either. I was robbed! I started frying up bacon a few months ago when I adopted this low carb diet. This diet creates havoc with the food at the local restaurant I've been eating breakfast/brunch at for many years whenever I was in town. Now I'm in town all the time and going to this place to eat every morning had gotten stale. With the incompatibility of their menu and my diet I found myself eating at home more ofter.

Founding out that it takes a long time to cook bacon as crisply as I prefer it has been a revelation to me. I can only get it the way I like it if I keep the temperature of the burner hot enough to cook the bacon, but not so high that it burns the bacon before it crisps all the fat. So, after I warm my expensive new omelet skillet I reduce the heat to medium so it will cook thoroughly without burning up. It takes me up to thirty minutes to cook four slices of bacon. Because I hadn't spent much time cooking bacon before I didn't really understand what I was asking a cook to do to make me happy. Particularly my wives who also worked and we were usually so rushed in the mornings to get out the door, asking them to spend an additional thirty minutes to get my bacon right was pure thoughtlessness. Frankly, I don't think I was such a hot catch that they would jump through their butts to please me at all. In reflection I realize they gave more than I deserved.

The kitchen is downstairs. There is no heat downstairs. In fact, there are no panes in the window holes, only screen wire to keep out the bugs. But that doesn't really work all that well either, because there is lots of other holes in the walls to let them in. The subflooring I put in green has spaces a half inch wide in places where on a bright day the ground under the house can be seen between each board. So, I was dressed warmly as I fried all the bacon in the package. I had turned on the FM radio and was tuned into a classical station that was playing some light, cheerful music. After my feet got cold enough I didn't really feel them anymore. Actually the cool temperature seem to suit the entire situation quite nicely. It didn't matter if I took two days to cook that bacon. I didn't have anything planned until the middle of next month. Not one single scheduled event to which I would have to dash away and not get my bacon at just the rightj crispiness.

Several times while the bacon was slowly reaching perfection I turned down the volume of the radio and played my flute. My embouchure was very good today. I made up several protracted songs and played with great satisfaction. When all the bacon was cooked I had already eaten about ten slices. I felt this great joy envelope me. I'm a bacon frying son-of-a-gun!

Sarah, in reference to an earlier comment you made about physical laws being bent or sidestepped. This is probably the central focus of my contemplations presently. Former experiences have had this happening with my own person. My current opinion is that what is conventionally called 'knowledge' is
the culprit responsible for making such events unlikely. It would be difficult for me to swear that any conscious effort on my part was designed to get these results. I feel lucky to remember such events at all. The more of me that is my contemporary-life memory is not restricted inside the "white room" to the particular body and life force I use presently. Getting those extended me-mores acquired in an undifferentiated dimension back across the veil of forgetfulness to beta consciousness, however, has never been a sure thing with me. I am somewhat apathetic about my inability to concentrate more intensely upon randomly chosen unemotional objects and topics convenient to my need for self importance, while the necessary focus automagically appears in more pertinent scenarios, although I'm never really sure whether this happens as an act of personal volition or is guided by unseen forces.

The recent discussion the group had about superstring theory made a strong impression with me. Especially in regard to the remarks about there being eleven completely separated dimensions mathematically possible as parallel universes. This notion has really excited me about specific experiences I remember from other eras that posited a distinct, but warily different environment for me.

For me, all possible dimensions exist simultaneously in no-time. I think it may be possible/probable that we cause events to happen in a pre-selected dimension that wouldn't happen of it's own process in that dimension without outside impetus unless I continuously, even though unknowingly strive for a recognizable, repeatable seminal experience while knowingly present in the other proposed dimensions where similar dimensional restrictions do not hold sway. Something of this sort may have been evidenced in the pyramid building era. My personal experience informs/deludes me, for better or worse, that other dimensions can be consciously acted upon, but getting reliable feedback to fine-tune the somewhat unpredictable results in that other dimension from another dimension simultaneously, can require the in situ cunning intuitively gained through a broad spectrum of human experience.

I wrote about this earlier in regard to using the rituals modeled in the primary sensory-based dimension as guideline to creating a state of consciousness in an unfamiliar dimension where self-awareness is at best speciously present, but not to the degree that personal volition to consciously conjure in that other dimension can be evoked spontaneously at will. My current conviction is to actively conjure a support cast of "way-shower" allies through visualization practices that will stimulate the active consciousness when present in the other dimension in order self-stimulate to use the sometime incomprehensible resources of that seemingly mythological "place".

Ecstagony

Caught eternally between
the love of my hating,
and the hate of my loving,
I sit unconcerned,
alone,
in my reflection of fear.
Hoping with the de-liberation
of hard-learned patience
for the ti-me to co-me
of my final deliverance
from the agony and ecstasy
of making believe
the images of my imagination
will set me free
from the ever clinging
fate of dualistic opposites.
Realization is always
one step beyond knowing
the unknown.

fmp 8/3/71


If I were to edit this poem from today's perspective, and I guess I have below. I would simply omit the lines... "from the ever clinging fate of dualistic opposites"

This phrasing seems youthfully didactic. It interrupts the flow of the original intent. To credit the scoundrel in me, I probably stuck it in there after the fact to impress some incidental person, for reasons that I no longer retain,

By removing those extraneous lines, the dimension is more authentically 'sound' to me, as if the right hocus pocus could actually deliver a sight yet undifferentiated, although dynamically and potentially "there" all along.

You gnow what I mean, the effect of the word on those who have ears to hear is similar to the reaction of neuron receptors when unlocked by the right chemical imprint. If the utterer's rituals proceed as planned and his mojo gets the correct combination of juices flowing, even the sky is not the limit. The carefully chosen abracadabra can open sesame any thick Wall of Jericho in existense, and when All Fall Down, as Herlihy might write, possess it's gratefully humbled inhabitants by the mystical appearance of the grail host shining forth in full regalia.

It's just a scam... Man! They've made at least a dozen movies about it! Some with spectacular special effects of truly bombastic appeal. But, even if it is the work of some fly-by-night broom straddler, it's just gotta be true! Is this not at least how it should be? Twinkle, twinkle, little star...

Ecstagony

Caught eternally between
the love of my hating,
and the hate of my loving,
I sit unconcerned,
alone,
in my reflection of fear.
Hoping with the de-liberation
of hard-learned patience
for the ti-me to co-me
of my final deliverance
from the agony and ecstasy
of making believe
the images of my imagination
will set me free.
Realization is always
one step beyond knowing
the unknown.

fmp 8/3/71

i have written a new mantrum. Now I gotta figure out how to repeated enough times to make it so. LOL

Yes, I agree with you completely. What you describe is entirely possible. Perhaps, when enough caring people rally to your cause, and do so in such a manner as to provide you with whatever you might need to make it so, your clarion call can rouse the will of the people and you will prevail despite all odds. Rest assured, dearest one, that you have my support. My best wishes to you in this endeavor!

I suppose things are going fairly well for me. It seems more and more difficult to contemplating how my life is going by comparing it with the run-of-the-mill daily grind sort of thing. It seems as if that has become rather impossible. I can only compare where I'm at NOW with where I was THEN, and so now and then I think I'm doing better or worse according to what part of my life comes up for reframing. I am constantly reframing the events of my life for the more detached audience I represent to my person presently.

Sure, some of the events of the past would not meet muster in the here and now. The words and actions that took place under extenuating circumstances then, seem ludicrous now, so my reframing makes the appropriate changes and is filtered for acceptable content. It's the rating system that appears to
go through the most change. After all, what is more appropriate for a 64 year old man pales in comparison with the dynamic in-your-face behavior of a much younger James Lee Hamilton. What a drama queen that boy was!

Reframing is basically a NLP term I use for what some call a recapitulation of my life. This recapitulation exists as a very slow process. Not every experience is available for review on demand, but seems more digital in nature. In other words, I find it difficult to conjure a particular time to review and then run it like a serial movie in my mind's eye from that point backward or forward to make sure I didn't miss any part of it. Rather, specific events pop up in my imaginator one after the other in quick succession, and I get what I can get when I can get it. Very haphazard way of doing things. Besides, if I run across an event that completely absorbs my attention, then more than likely I will attach to the emotions of that event to the degree that I lose all other reference points associated with that event.

I admit, however, that as I age, and as the more emotionally charged careactorizations of my past get rewired to a more sophisticated concatenation. More of those experiences seem more manageable. In this way, by the overall reduced static induced by my paltry efforts appears to allow me to reach deeper past those sensational moments that have taken up so much of my attention. If I live long enough, and am able to maintain at least some perseverance of my recapitulative efforts, my entire personality careactorizations will no long exist.

My life has grown amazingly uncomplicated. I just congratulated myself for remembering that I had already poured my second cup of coffee and turned the coffe pot off an hour ago. It's no wonder I still smack my lips and tongue to enjoy the aftertaste of seriously rich gourmet coffee. It's my only real indulgence other than cigarettes. Everything else is dealt with very severely. I have not left my house today. The weather is cold and rainy. Very raw and unforgiving. I have an inside place to be, why would I leave it.

Earlier, I wrote a bit on caring. Caring can kill you. When carried to extremes it will make you crazy. The act of caring should be banned. There is no good end to it. There appear to exist mandated acts of caring. Things people are naturally expected to care about. God, family, job, and a sense of patriotism for one's own way of life as handed down from the ancestors. These are those worrisome things we get led into thinking we "should" worry about them. As if it's out duty and responsibility to care about some things. Even if we have to fake it. Even if we have to pretend these things are sacred to us, whether they are or not, we should respect tradition. Oh... yeah?

The ultimate rebellion in life is when we decide not to invest in needless caring. In the Gospel of Thomas it is written that when Jesus's disciples asked him what was the secret of becoming Christ-like, he told them "Don't lie, and don't do anything you don't want to." He may have been directly addressing this issue of caring, or at least pretending to care, when you actually don't. I have been pretending to care about a bunch of petty formalities that have become too much of a burden to bear. For some time now I have devised insignificent little ways to see what kind of response I might get if I told the truth about how I really feel or don't feel about some of the sacred cows my community holds so dear. In most cases, they never blink an eye. "Another one bites the dust..."

I tried an experiment for the last couple of days. A friend of mine who gets too deep in the beer barrel told me that he had stopped drinking for the last few weeks, and attributed this remarkable lack of inebriation to a new pill his doctor had prescribed. He brought me a couple of pills to try so I could understand how it helped him. I took one of the pills two nights ago, and the other one yesterday morning. This resulted in my sleeping about ten hours night before last, and felt very relaxed and sleepy pretty much all day yesterday. My friend dropped by yesterday for a brief visit just after I was starting to feel the effect of the second pill. He stated that he had also gotten sleepy when he first started taking the pills, but after the first week he seemed to have gotten the opposite affect, he got a lot of energy from the pill. He bragged about how it had made him feel horny. I am happy he has been able to stop drinking, and that his libido has picked up, but I don't think I will take any more of these pills. They appear to take the edge off my need for displaying caution in my relationships with others. I seem perfectly aware of the need to do so.

My interest in the digital age seems to have taken a more specific direction. I've found a few news sites that specialize in nanotechnology that have articles on what's going on in that field. Almost every day a new discovery or invention comes out that surprises me. I didn't get into computers until I was near fifty years old. They weren't around as personal computers until the late Eighties, and yet because of my youngest brother I did get involved with them about then. As intriguing as the development of the digital age has been, I couldn't have imagined some of the extent miniturization would get to presently, much less what will eventually come to pass. I just read yesterday about IBM announcing they had put together the smallest motor ever constructed. The size of it is fairly incredible. The article I read about this motor suggested some possible ways it can be used, and that was even more startling. Prior to the Millenium, my reason for wanting to live a long life was just to experience what actually would happen in 2001. I expected something spectacular to come about because of all the hype beforehand, but was definitely not as impressed as I thought I might be. It was pretty ho-hum when compared to those eagerly awaited catastrophes that were predicted. But, in fact, something did happen during the turn of the millenium, and that was the progress made in nanotechnology. Now I would like to live in a coherent manner for another ten years just to see what they will come up with next.

I really hate working with fiberglass insulation. I know that when I get through with this project my bedroom will be warmer this winter, but putting the insulation in is a real drag. I'm trying to do this on the cheap as much as I can, so that include using the insulation my brother brought me from a job he was working on a couple of years ago. It's good stuff, but it was designed for installation in a commercial application and so I have to cut it up to fit into my walls. Cutting it into the sizes I need means that I have to deal with the fiberglass directly, and it gets all into my skin, especially my hands.

It's thanksgiving eve. My natal family hasn't contacted me to join the celebration. Usually, they send me an e-mail and tell me where the big show will happen. This year it hasn't happened. I might be upset by this to some degree, but I don't concern myself with it too much. We have not communicated well for the last few years. I seem to be losing what friends I have left and right. There is no blame in this. I'm not exactly the most cordial person in the world. I think I have done as much or more to maintain my part of taking care of my mother, but I haven't for a while now. It would take another ten years of commitment from my brothers and sisters to catch up with the time I've contributed toward this effort, but I feel resentment frome them now that I have insisted they do their part. That's life.

Today a woman on the NDE discussion group I participate in sent a post with a good bit of information on Swedenborg. I've read one of his books and lots of websites about this man. He reminds me of myself in a lot of ways. Not that my life is anywhere near as significant as his, but it's the personal things that I feel empathy with. When one commits themselves to living the life of spiritual curiosity much disbelief in what one is trying to accomplish is found lacking. People get up and go to work everyday and deal with spirtuality when they can arrange it and hope for the best. There is no blame in this. They do what they can. Mostly it amounts to reading books and discussing things with others occasionally. They don't understand that they have to put their lives on the line. I'm not sure why I have, I just always have. It's very costly as far as the other is concerned. People don't understand that taking a stand against the religious training they had as a child is not enough. In my case, it has to do with lying. Almost everyday I find some other aspect of where I have lied to myself. It would be a lot easier to just live the lie. I have to force myself to confront these lies. I don't really like to do it, but I do.

Things have been fairly sedate around here lately. I worked on the remodeling project a little. Since I'm not time-constrained like working people I get up and move when I wanna, and if I don't want to move I dunna. Strange weather we've been having here. We haven't had even a light frost yet. Yesterday it was in the seventies.

I wrote some pretty revealing stuff about myself on one of the discussion groups I participate in. One of the responses I got after a little discussion of what I wrote was, "I'm amazed at your honesty!" I've heard this a lot, and yet I don't feel as if I'm as honest as I need to be. I'm honest about what I want to be, and if I don't want to be honest about a particular topic I simply don't write about it.

One of the more difficult challenges I've had in my life is about lying. Usually my lying is not malicious. I exaggerate mostly, and the lies are to myself. I have a tendency to build myself up in my own eyes. It probably has to do with self importance. I've heard other people say that if you don't treat yourself as important, how can you expect anyone else to. I have a problem with that. My efforts to get other people to think I'm important has been the basis for much of the heartache I've felt in my life. Carlos Castenada stated in one of his books that the need for self importance is the biggest deterrent to spiritual development a person can encounter. I didn't pay that much attention to this statement when I read this in his book. My youngest brother did and brought this statement to my attention. We have discussed this concept a lot over the years, and I have accepted that the statement contains a lot of truth to it. It seems congruent with the extended research I have done on the concept of modesty. One of the most revealing descriptions I have encountered about modesty came from Alexander Pope. I've never read Pope's stuff to any extent, but the one statement about modesty has stuck with me for a long time. He wrote, "Modesty is the art of power."

When I lie, and especially when I lie to myself, it's one of the most immodest things I can do. It certainly does emerge as an abuse of power. Because when I lie to myself about anything, the response to such an act reduces my power to move mountains.

It amazes me to continuously find out how little it takes to push me right on into ecstasy, and how ecstasy can appear debilitating. My old '87 S-10 Blazer has been giving me trouble for years. I spent a lot of money putting two rebuilt engines into it. But, no matter what I did it always came back to the same problems. Today I realize that I probably spent that money in vain, because it wasn't the engine block that was giving me the trouble. Yesterday my mechanic found the problem. One small passageway in the injector block was blocked up with carbon. That passageway needed to be open so that it could pull a vacuum on another part that is directly connected to the operation of the car's computer, and that wasn't happening. They had to pull the injector block out of the car twice, and only when they did it the second time and used a titanium drill to ream out the carbon build up would the car run correctly. This same plugged hole in the injector block had ruined two new engines because they never checked it when they bolted it on the new engines. Bah... Humbug!

Anyway, now my Blazer runs pretty good. I took it out for a long trial run and it thrilled me to the core. Now I can use some of the money I was saving for another vehicle to work on my house a little. It's about time.

I had a kind of exotic dream this morning. I found myself traveling in an Asian country. I was being treated with a greater degree of respect than I expected. I was told that it was because of the woman I was traveling with. She was a sometime friend of mine that I have known for a long time. Her ex-husband used to be the band director in high school. We have attempted to have some sort of relationship before, but that didn't seem to work out too well because she is a very busy woman, and I needed more time than she allowed.

In my dream, it wasn't so much the relationship between me and this woman that brought the respect, it was because I was with a woman of my own kind, and didn't chase after the Asian women there in their own country. This seemed to mean a lot to them. The atmosphere in much of Asia has apparently changed a lot since I visited there while I was in the Navy back in the late Fifties and early Sixties. Then, there was a lot of abject poverty that was still prevalent due to what happened around the time of World War 2. The people of Japan and Taiwan were so desperate they would sell you their daughters for enough money for their families to subsist on. I found the stories I had read about how female children were considered of less value than male children to be generally true, and selling them to the highest bidder was not considered a bad thing to do there. Maybe with the economic changes that have raised the level of income and the women's movements have changed that for the better.

Many of my current dreams seem to feature women. While napping around lunch time yesterday I dreamed of this one woman that has a lot of familiarity for me in my dreamtime. She was sitting and talking to me about a subject I don't remember much about. One thing that impressed me was that she had a male companion that never spoke or interrupted her. There was something about the sight of him that suggested a Greek god of some kind. I only remember seeing him from the waist up. He was bare-chested, and his musclar development seemed a little too perfect. He wasn't built like a body-builder, but was very lean and rangy looking, and he appeared to be physically adept in a way that caught my attention. He had a very stream-lined, sleek look to him, and yet seemed completely content with himself.

I rarely dream of my dead father. Last night I saw him again. It was just a brief encounter. I walked through the old house we lived in from the time I was about thirteen until I left to join the Navy at eighteen. I opened the backdoor and there he was sitting by the steps. He looked up and asked me, "Are you looking for me?" I answered, "Not really." He was just sitting there and I run into him not expecting to see him there.

That old house, like many of the houses we lived in during my childhood is gone now. Others are still around. The places we lived helps me to remember much of my childhood because I associate what happened there. I believe that if I had been raised in the same house all of my life I would have forgotten many incidences of my youth. I know people whose entire existence occurred in the same place, and they don't seem to remember as much as I do about their lives.

It's the same with moving around. Last night I watched a movie about some murders that happened on a Navajo Indian reservation. The scenery was magnificent. I have been through many of the same locations many times when I was hitch-hiking. That country is so different from how it is here on the east coast. There is so little fresh water there, and what little there is attracts the people who live there. There is vast areas of uninhabited land. The color of the land is brown, for the most part, and one can be alone very easily. The movie reminded me of being there all those years ago.

Sometime I eat breakfast with a relatively new friend whose name is Roy. One of the interesting things about Roy is that we are the same age. We graduated from high school in the same year. When we were children I didn't know Roy and Roy didn't know me. We lived in the same town, but we belonged to two completely different cultures. Roy is black. He was such a good football player he was offered a scholarship to go play
at Ohio State University by the famous coach Woody Hayes. I played football. I never heard of him back in those days.

Shit happens, things change. We have spent hours in the last year talking about what has happened since. We knew a different world. It's gone now. Let the dead past bury it's dead.

I seem sure that the subject I write about will be disturbing to some. That said, I wonder if humans have ever practiced killing the young of a woman whose husband or mate has been killed or defeated. The Alpha male of a lion's pride seem to do this with impunity. I watched a nature show on PBS last night about walruses and sea lions last night. The mature bulls seem to kill the young just crawling across them on there way to the ocean after the breeding season. When the time comes for the herd to leave to go to new feeding grounds after the mating season, they leave the newborns on the beach to fend for themselves. They have to learn to avoid the waiting sharks and teach themselves to survive without the accompaniment of the mature members of the herd. They are not taught to hunt for food nor are they protected in any way when they first enter the ocean. Over 50% of them die before they learn how to survive. Humans seem to place too much value on life.

I don't remember too much about the dreams I woke up to this morning. I only remember that they had something to do with cutting across lines of flux to produce electricity. The way I have conducted my whole life involves this. The way I rebelled against my early caregivers onward was like cutting across the conventional way of doing things was like those acts of defiance produced sparks, for sure. I had something goingt they were attempting to get me to ignore and forgetand that was what conjured those defiant acts. I realize now, well, since the last couple of days when I learned how my will to act out of my own volition, was the real aim of their efforts. They gave me "will power". Lots of it. They just didn't appreciate that I used that will power to resist them.

Funny thing that. For all these years I didn't really grok what the human will was when the other talked about it. Not clearly like I do now. What's more amazing is to understand that the will is not natural. It had to be developed little by little. In that case, my mother and father really did good by me. Perhaps too good. I have used my will to defy the world.

Once, when driving down to the Florida Keys, I picked up a hitch-hiker. He was really whacked out. Not exactly scary, but he had figgity little habits that were a little different. He talked about a different kind of crazy shit than I talked about when I was in the same condition he was in. I told him about my philosopy of life. After a while, he looked at me, composed in what I suppose was his most serious composure, and told me, "Man... you are taking on the whole damn world. You will never win!" I told him I didn't expect to win. The only important thing for me was to fight the good fight.

I stopped going to my friend Sebron's restaurant in the afternoons to have lunch and do my crossword puzzles for a couple of years. The I Ching had told me not to go there because of the crowd that ate there, and I was following the advice of the I Ching religiously then. They were not my friends. I gnew exactly what it was talking about. The crowd that came in there were just a bunch of local businessmen. My father had gone there and sat with them. He told me that most of the business that happened around town happened at their coffee gatherings. I never sat with them. I only went there in the afternoons after the lunch crowd had gone, sat by myself and worked my puzzles. I could tell they would have liked for me to join them and be part of the ol' gang, but that had never been my style.

Then, a couple of months ago Sebron mentioned to my younger brother that he had not seen me for a while, and I decided to stop by just to assure him that my not going had nothing to do with him personally. It actually did have something to do with him, but it wasn't the way he thought. The reason I didn't go there had more to do with the music he plays there. He tunes into one of the "Oldies but Goldies" stations that only played music from our youth. It drives me crazy to listen to that stuff. I didn't even like "beach music" back then. Why would I want to listen to what I didn't like then repetitiously for the next forty years. He seems stuck in that mode. Like he stopped living after he was twenty-five years old, and never learned anything or even found life interesting after then. There are a lot of people around town like that. They just extended their mental retardation to where it didn't show up until after high school and sometime college. They stopped growing then. It's so sad it embarrasses me to be around them. I worry that I will make smart-assed remarks that will hurt their feelings. It doesn't do any good to do that. It's not like they don't have the mental capacity to grow, it's just that they stopped using their mental capacity to grow after a certain age.

The other dream that I remember partially has to do with that music. A phrase from that era was part of one of my dreams. I think it has to do with a female entitiy that is omnipresent in my dream life. The phrase runs close to this, "If you don't know me by now. You will never never ever know me. You will never never ever know me..." I woke up with that tune repeating itself over and over. I know her.

It's not the whole of how the mind works that interests me. It may be impossible for one man over one lifetime, but if it is possible, then it is through this periperal information like what appeared in my remembering vision that can make it so. What does interest me is how can I pay attention to the comprehension occurring in the foveal and peripheral occurring simultaneously, and how could I conjure this possibility up for use at my leisure?

In other words, if these visions are occurring all the time and I simply don't know how to access them or are somehow deliberately, but unconsciously ignoring them as they show up, then I think I may be missing seemingly infinite possibilities somehow.

Presently, I am only exploring how to access the peripheral comprehension that my visions prove possible... under any circumstances. I gnow from my past experience with palm, tarot, and other occult exploratory readings that I do access this peripheral information in the presence of another person. I gnow from my visions that I can access peripheral information while alone and without the influence of the other. But, this type of accessing is far too random and haphazard to satisfy me. I am beginning to think that the comprehension of peripheral data is somehow associated with a particular aspect of the dream state.

I would like to learn how to access peripheral comprehension anytime I choose. I don't gnow if I would enjoy being forced by circumstance to have this going on all the time whether I wanted it to happen or not. In other words, if I did learn how to access the information available in the peripheral vision, would I be turning on a switch that I couldn't turn off without gnowing the possible affect it might have on my being able to pretend to a normal lifestyle? While I may be an island in regard to my projection of my self-image upon the world, I don't live on an island alone without other people around, who could possibly interpret this state as a danger to themselves and eradicate or isolate me from them for the good of the whole.

The effect of my "remembering vision" was very profound, and completely altered the way I see the world. I sense that I have to be willing to allow the information available through the peripheral focus to change me, like it did in the case of my remembering vision, and surmise that it's my refusal to change to accomodate that information that disallows referencing that information. Perhaps it has something to do with an unconscious fear that it will require the huge change my remembering vision had with me.

I continue to read a bit about eye-movement. The technical jargon, or rather my lack of it, could get in the way of total comprehension of the subject as these researchers describe it. But, reading the material still provokes a lot of interaction with my memores.

I have spent a considerable amount of time studying hypnosis in my life. I went to my first hypnosis school in my mid twenties, and my curiosity still lingers now at the age of 64.

The most interesting part of what I've read about eye-movement is the material it has dredged up in regard to the peripheral focus. This research material states that human comprehension happens mostly in the foveal focus and is present to a much lesser degree in the parafoveal focus, and least of all in the peripheral focus. And yet, my contemplations have led me to believe (for the sake of my argument) that my visions happened as a result of possessing a certain comprehension in the peripheral focus.

In the event of my most powerful vision, I "saw" it simultaneous while holding full comprehension of a Moody Blues poster that contained the lyrics of some of their songs. "Seeing" the activity of the vision took place as if it were a dream right alongside of reading the lyrics on the poster. I was aware of both at once.

This may associate with the perceived lack of volition present in deep hypnotic trance. The subject CAN act of their own volition, but in that state they don't seem to be aware of it. They sit and wait for the hypnotist to offer a suggestion, and then happily act upon whatever is offered. Once the suggestion is carried out, they return to the
waiting as if they can't think of anything else to do.

This seems to equate to the newborn state where we are taught bit by bit that we can act out of our own volition to
roll over, to crawl, to stand up, and finally to walk. Speaking seems to come the same way.

"Say momma... you can do it baby.. say momma. Come on baby...say momma for me."

The newborn is coaxed, little by little, to act and speak out of their own volition. Thus the persona is created, and at a
certain level of competence... the ego is born.

"The king is dead! Long live the King!"

This change that comes with the transference that happens with the development of the ego is very important in spiritual work and contemplation. The ego, in this case, arrives with the deep self knowledge that we can act out of our own volition. That we don't necessarily have to be coaxed out of our child-like waiting for external stimulation to speak and act. We are free to do as we will. Some call this "free will", but is it really?

While it might seem true that we do experience a certain freedom with the development of the will, our so-called "free will" is paid for incrementally as we learn to take on the careactoristics of our caregivers. What really happens is that we learn that we can imitate the world around us whenever and however we like. At this point of liberation we have learned that our instigating and empowering our will to mimic doesn't depend on the other. We can imitate them whether they like it or not. Most importantly, we intuit that they don't even know what they are doing that we are imitating. They are not self aware. Fancy that!

The spiritual problems we experience in life springs from this development. When we learn that we can act of our on volition, we learn to hold the non-volitional state of the newborn in disdain. It was the problem, and having free will is the answer. The child-like state of non-volition is relegated to a condition of unimportance, and generally ignored as not being valuable. Big mistake!

As I sit here typing away, I find myself very excited about learning what the Will is, and how it came into play in my life. I've always wondered about what the hell people were talking about when they talked or wrote about the will and free will... and now I gnow. LOL

I love writing! It exposes things about myself to myself like no other activity I have ever engaged in.

I just woke up from this dream where my old college director was making this movie that had some scenes that were being shot on a stage. At first I thought I just happened to be there visiting. I was hanging around, and then after some activity he handed me a script with somebody else's name on it. I knew the name and the guy, and so I asked Edgar what happened to him. He told me that the guy had some problems and wasn't able to be there, and so he wanted me to play that part adding that it would be a quick $300 for me, and that it would be easy enough to do. I was happy to get the part and especially the money, but I was a little confused about which part I would have in the movie because I had watched a rehearsal just previously, and didn't see the guy whose role I would be taking during the rehearsal.

There was one part of the dream where I was sitting with Edgar watching the actors practice (before I found out that
I was going to have a part in it) and talking to him about one of the actors. The cast had entered stage left in a sort of
chorus line, the cameras were rolling, and this one guy came out deliberately emoting and suddenly smiled and waved at us. The cameras were rolling and I turned and asked Edgar if his silliness wouldn't ruin the scene. He said that the actor had played the lead in The Wiz, and that he could edit the wave out. He felt lucky to have him for the movie.

About that time they took a break and we milled around a bit. I somehow knew all the actors in the and felt comfortable with them. I left the script Edgar gave me laying on the stage when we took the break along with my cigarettes. During the break I wanted to have a smoke and instead of getting my own cigarettes I decided to bum one from another actor, and in the dream, each person that was smoking said they had just run out.

As I headed to get my own pack of cigarettes Edgar announced that we were to resume shooting. I couldn't find my
cigarettes or my copy of the script he had given me. I started panicking because I suddenly realized that I hadn't even looked at the script to see what role I was playing or what lines I may have in the scene.

I knew the reason I was panicked because the same thing had happened before in a real movie I had been in. They had given me a script just like in the dream, but they didn't tell me which part I was playing, and so when I got to the
set, I had memorized the lines for the wrong character and went through some embarrassing humiliation when they announced that I was playing a different character and I didn't know the lines of the character I was really going to
portray, so in the dream I felt very insecure because I sensed I was going to suffer the same type of humiliation all over again.

I woke up from the dream in a very disconcerted mood. I lay in bed reviewing my dream for a while, and began to think about how it could be possible that I had created everything in the dream, and how real the experience had
been for me.

The content of this dream is a useful metaphor for how I view the concept of projection. For contemplation's sake, I consider that I created every character and every physical item in the dream including all the stage scenery. As I lay in bed after waking from my dream I realized that I do the same thing in real life. It's not really any different than creating a dream. I see the world around me as if what I experience is like a dream. I interpret everything I sensorily perceive as if it were a dream. Every action, every word, every plant, animal, and mineral appears to me as if they were doing and saying what I "think" the actors in my environment are doing and saying... and I act like it's what I ideate is going on in real life

The only difference between real life and a dream is that I can't control what happens as I do in lucid dreaming. To have a lucid dream I have to realize I am dreaming before I can began to redirect what I find happening in my dream to take the direction I want the dreaming scenario to go. In real life, however, I act as though what I interpret can be managed like what happens in lucid dreaming, and many times it just doesn't work out that way.

Okay, so I haven't got this description down the way I want it. But, at least I think I've found the right metaphor to
finally have a chance of writing a description that might satisfy me. Maybe that's worth getting up at four o'clock in
the morning to write this crap out.

I am really pleased the weather is changing and it's getting cooler once again. Not many things please me more than getting under warm covers to sleep. It's almost like crawling back into the womb. In more ways than one. As a child we didn't have very good heating in the series of houses we lived in. No one did. It may have been invented earlier, but it didn't come to the neighborhoods we lived in until after I had left home and joined the Navy. When we went to bed and got under the covers when it was cold, that was the only time we got warm all over our bodies all at the same time. I like for it to be cold outside of my bed. I just snuggle in deeper and it makes me feel so lovely.

There have been long periods in my life where I slept outside for weeks and months on end. To have an inside place to be with electric blankets to warm my bed up before I crawl into it is like living in the lap of luxury, and I take advantage of it. Many times I leave the doors and the windows opens so the cold will come on in. It is so much less noise when it gets cold. No motors running this and that. Silent night... wholy night.

The only thing I remember about this dream I had two nights ago was that I drove up to the window of a burger joint and selected my food by pushing some buttons. When I got to the window I didn't get what I thought I'd ordered, and so I complained that I had been given the wrong stuff.

Then, I went into another completely different scenario. That's the part I don't remember. I only remember that it was composed of an effort to distract some other and get my own way.

Suddenly, in the dream, I was back in my car outside the restaurant still fuming about not getting the right stuff. A plain-clothes cop drove up. We both got out of the car. He came up to me and asked me what was wrong. When he started feeling around my waist for a weapon I realized that the restaurant manager had called him to deal with me. I explained to him that I had merely gotten the wrong stuff, and that if they would give me what I ordered I would be happy to leave. I knew that he had not listened to a word I'd been saying. He walked off to talked to the manager of the restaurant who was located in a small building outside the restaurant.

The interesting thing to me about this dream was what really happened in between we ordering and not getting the correct order, and the arrival of the cop. It was like a completely different set of circumstances. When the cop arrived, I forgot what happened in between.

In a dream this morning I found myself back in the Navy. For some reason I got transferred from one ship to another type of ship that I had never served on. I get the impression that I had arranged this transfer through my own devices. The crew on the new ship seemed happy to see me, but I had forgotten my dress uniforms and left them on my old ship. I knew that I could not leave the new ship without dress uniforms to go on liberty or stand inspection. I was bewildered by my forgetfulness. It seemed to be an old, old story for me. I didn't have the proper dress to be completely free, and to be considered up to par to have my life inspected.

One of the most frequent mistakes I make with other people is I expect more from them than they are capable of delivering. I have a tendency to make them smart and more sophisticated than they really are, and when they don't live up to what I expected them to be capable of we both end up disappointed. Many times they realize right away that I have over estimated their talents, but go along with me because it feels good to have another think well of you and say so.

Saying nice things to people only has so much usefulness. Politeness and compliments only go so far. Wrighting and acting in such a way seems to encourage people who profess to want change, to stay the way they are, especially when their biggest complaint is that they don't particularly like the way they are and seem to expect more of themselves. If they want to move to a higher level of understanding than the level they are habituated to, playing the sycophant to their dissatisfaction is a copout. Only the person who does not fear challenging their need for acceptance as they are, can provide the motivation they need to change.

More often than we might suspect things are not exactly what they seem. Some people like to promote the idea that certain experiences change their lives in such a way that they lose their inhibitions about the way they address the world, and through these experiences they are able to be more honest and sincere both with themselves and the world around them. They seem to go to great lengths to promote their new courage and enter into the malstrom of life with renewed hope and energy, and can sometime take on challenges they would not have dared to before their unsubstantiated claim to personal liberation.

For many, these claims may become a sort of self-evident truth and they begin to take risks they previously would not take. Some seem to retire into seclusion in order that they may savor their newly gained confidence until it blooms into a source of great joy and ecstasy to be shared only with their loved ones. Still others like to go public and use these experiences as a form of self promotion to feature themselves as the mediums of God-like virtues and the dispensers of unconditional love. Many of the televangelists seem to take this route. They seem to favor saying they have a personal relationship with God, by any other nayme, and start deciding what sort of behavior their followers must conform to in order to attain to the same level of sanctity they claim to possess, because they had certain experiences rarely suffered even by the wise. With enough publicity, often with pictures of angels fluttering around their umbrellas of superiority, their original experiences become less of a feature of God's blessings than of their own need for self importance.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the influence of the human's will to live. On a discussion list I was subscribed to recently there was one fellow who claimed that the entire purpose of religion was to destroy one's will to live, in order to attain resurrection and trancendence into the higher realms of understanding. Every post to this list garnered a response from this fellow that the pleasures of this life were filthy and degrading. He was attacked by practically all the positive thinking members of the group, including myself, and in effect was told that God wanted us to be happy and enjoy what we could of this life because sooner than we might realize we would die and the chance would be gone forever. He was unrelenting in his assessment of our foulness and degradation, and insisted that our will to live was the culprit who would prevent us from attaining transcendence.

It took a while for me to contemplate his contentiousness and allow that he might be right. I am beginning to agree with him to some degree. I have often wondered what the religious leaders have meant when they refer to some odd notion they call the original sin, and have begun to consider whether or not the will to live is that which they speak of. The rare few who have experienced a near death experience write about the glorious experiences they had when they relinquished their will to live and accepted death as the consequence of their doing so. Yet, when they didn't die, they seem to take their not dying as a mandate to save the world, and thus redevelop the will to live with an even greater vigor than ever before to carry out their mission. World saviors do seem an odd lot, but they can be very entertaining.

I had a somewhat revealing dream this morning. I found myself out on a construction job. I was there as the friend of a friend who had borrowed some equipment from me to get the job going. The equipment was a small front-end loader and a load of bricks. There were a lot of people around the job site, but not many of them were working. They were using my material to build what was being built. I hung around the edges of the job trying to make myself useful, but there was nothing much for me to do. It seemed like I was just in the way of all the other people who were trying to find something to do. I approached my friend to ask him what was going on and he told me that if I didn't like what was going on, then I could just go. So naturally, I decided to take my stuff and go home, but instead I woke up. The whole dream felt like a child's game.

After I woke up and started thinking about the dream I decided to act like all the characters in the dream were different aspects of my own person. This has not been pleasant. The whole dream made me feel stupid. I began to wonder if the people I'm involved with in my life were just like the characters in my dream. Were they using my stuff just to look busy like they were trying to build something with my stuff, and then acting like my being in their life was an inconvenience to their pretentions?

Most of the experiences I've had in my life that seemed to have given me the direction my life has taken are made of of experiences I had when I was alone and without human witnesses to verify anything happened at all. They are indeed, all in my own mind. Yet, I describe these experiences like they are what make me important as a human, and yet, nobody gnows but me. I hallucinate these experiences have value because of what I have read or heard other people describe about their experiences in life, but maybe what they think is important and what I think is important is not really all that important at all. With the question being, is there anything important about life at all?

I have sat around for the last two and a half years doing nothing since I started drawing my Social Security check. A year ago I went with my friend Billy down to Georgia and worked as a pipefitter for about two weeks. Made some good money, but I was waiting the whole time we were there for them to discover that I didn't really know what the hell I was doing. When we got fired for them catching Billy smoking in an unauthorized area I was quite relieved. The only other time I have been active during this "retirement" period was when the North Carolina Revenue Department audited my state taxes for the years 1997-98 and I couldn't find my W-2 form for 1998 and had to jump through my ass to get a copy to prove the company I worked for had indeed paid my taxes. In the end, after driving myself a little more insane, it turned out that they owed me a bigger refund than they had sent me back then. In this particular case, driving myself crazy over nothing at all proved profitable. If driving myself crazy over nothing had been constantly profitable I should be as rich as Midas.

There are other people who have become a part of my life recently, mostly people on the internet through e-mail. I have some local friends that I see occasionally. They come to my house and we drink a little wine together and talk about what happens in our lives and about what we think is important in our world, but it is not earth-shaking stuff, only events that happen to just about everybody. I find it difficult to understand why they consider the events in their lives important. It's all about their love affairs which are not going anywhere, their struggles with money (mostly the lack of it.), and their health.

I am at least ten years older than any of these people. When I think about what they struggle with, I realize that I have not struggled with these things in a long time, because I decided to leave these so-called struggles behind as an effort in futility. Nothing really needs to be done about these daily affairs. They just come and go life friends I used to gnow, and the outcomes always seem to take care of themselves no matter what my friends do or don't do about them. Just like me. Are my friends just characters in my dream? If I wake up, will they disappear from the face of the earth?

I just remembered something else that happened in my dream this morning. The people on that job that was using my stuff were building square columns out of the bricks my friend had borrowed. I kept tearing the facades of the brick columns down. Nobody even noticed. They just kept busy building new ones. It was almost as if they were using borrowed stuff to make things that didn't matter to them, the only thing that mattered was that they kept busy. The thing that frustrated me and made me tear down their work was they ignored a nagging need of my own. I felt like I should be busy too, as if the only reason I was there was to provide them with the materials and machinery necessary for them to act busy and accomplish something that was important to them, and my need to act busy just got in their way.

You know... I have been thinking about our conversationabout the possible state of Ben's health. I told you how his expression of appreciation of my visiting him at the corralseems sincere, but a little out of the ordinary.

I had another friend who lived in Clinton for a good while. His name was Noel Carter. He was from Kentucky too. He was a drunk too. For about ten years I used to go over to his machine shop to visit and drink a little with him. When he
reached a certain state of inebriation he would get very adventurous intellectually. This seemed very similar to how
booze can help a person break through their social inhibitions and flirt with the girls and get out on the dance floor and cut a rug. Except with Noel it seem to give him the ability to cut through the inhibitions that stoppedhim from displaying his intellectual reach.

Noel had incredible intellectual powers. Of course, he had to have a few drinks before he would let anyone see that. He had been in the Air Force and his job there was the repair and upkeep of C-140 aircraft. It didn't take him long to
become the crew chief on a specific airplane, and his knowledge of these airplanes was phenomenal. I have sit with
him for hours and listened to his descriptions of the various systems involved in the operation of this aircraft.

In the same way, he described how various types of jet engines worked, and what needed to be there for them to work properly. While this topic is not as interesting to me as many others, his unique "country boy" was of using a great number of fascinating metaphors and analogies to get me to visualize what he was describing. These metaphors came straight from his childhood in Kentucky, and over the years and the bottles of Black Jack we consumed together I felt as though I could wander through Kentucky almost as a native
son.

The people from this section of the country have a unique way of expressing themselves. It took me a while to absorb and understand the small but distinct ways of using common phrases that sometime meant the very opposite of what might normally be taken by their usage.

Noel died when he was 52 years old. In the last two years before he died I didn't see him as often as I had in the
past. I had started working a mechanical engineering job over at Fort Bragg, and between the commute and the time I
had to spend on the job I only got to see him on weekends occasionally. I could see that things had changed with him,
and he was taking even less care of his health. He entered a kind of lethargy that left him disinterested in many of the
things he had formerly taken an interest in. He didn't take in work to make money with any real effort any more, and he had taken to eating mostly beans that he cooked on his wood stove and occasionally eating wieners. I started buying some food like beef stew and taking it over to him to try to encourage him to eat.

He was always a small, skinny man. He had very small, delicate bones. He got even skinnier, even though I didn't
think that was possible, and yet he developed a little bloaty looking pooch to his stomach. One of the last times I went over to his shop to visit, he had a large cyst that appeared on his face, and he had stopped bathing and changing clothes. He looked awful, but when I drove up to the door of his shop where he was working on a lawn mower he
looked up and offered his old grin to welcome me.

One day I was sitting at the counter of the restaurant where we had met. He had quit coming there, so I was a little
surprised when he walked up behind me and tapped me on the opposite shoulder and laughed a little when I looked the wrong way. Then, he got very serious and asked me if I would do him a favor. I told him I would, and asked him what the favor was. He wanted to know if I would take him to the VA hospital at Fayetteville. I said that of course I would, and asked him what was wrong. His eyes got a little teary whenhe told me something was terribly wrong in his belly. I expressed my sorrow at his discomfort, and asked him when he wanted me to take him to Fayetteville. I think this was on a Friday. He told me that he needed to go on Monday. I agreedto take him anytime he felt the need.

On Sunday afternoon I stopped by his shop to coordinate our getting together to make the trip. The door to his shop was open as usual, but when I went inside to talk to him he wasn't there. Instead, there was another skinny fellow who told me that he was Noel's cousin, and that Noel's mother had come down from Kentucky to take him home. Apparently he had called her since I had seen him, and she recognized he was in trouble and had come to get him.

His cousin told me that Noel was over at the motel room his mother had rented, and told me that Noel may like it if I
went over to visit him before he left. I didn't do that. I knew Noel would not like for me to see him in that condition. I never saw him again. Turned out he had developed colon cancer and had waited too long for them to do anything but
cut it all out and send him home to die.

As I thought it over I realized that Noel had told me in his own way that he knew something was wrong and said goodbye to me. I sort of got that same feeling from Ben the last time I saw him. These ol' boys from Kentucky have their own way.

Quite often I find myself somewhat amazed at how people take that which they have been trained to think they're like as the gospel truth. I wrote my opinion on why I think the Jewish tribes have suffered persecution throughout their existence on a discussion group I subscribe to, and got a response from a woman to claims to be Jewish stating that I was descriminatory for even having an opinion of their history. I suppose if I had offered an opinion about why the native American Indians lost their land and territories the Indians in the group would have written that my assessment of why they suffered that loss would have written in to say that I descriminated against them. Some people... eh?

The real problem with these types of things has to do with the world getting smaller and the tribal unity of all peoples who attempt to segregate themselves from the rest of the world are losing their hold on their children who had rather join the world community than kowtow to their ancient customs. Purists always lose their battles to keep things pure. I doubt very seriously if there ever has been a pure race. In fact, it simply doesn't work out because even if the purists got their way the bloodlines would dissipate because of inbreeding and they would end up a bunch of idiots who could not even defend themselves against attack.

A friend mentioned in an e-mail that there was going to be a TV program on the true nature of the relationship between Jesus of Nazareth and Mary Magdalene as represented in the art of Leonardo Da Vinci. I decided to watch it in order to knowingly participate in the discussion that might follow. I was only vaguely aware of the Da Vinci information. I didn't know that he was supposed to be part of a secret society that were given secret information about what happened to Mary after Jesus's death. I wasn't too impressed with this part of the program.

What I did find interesting was the fact that so many scholars considered Mary Magdalene the Grail vessel herself. That her relationship with him was due to the fact that she was considered the vessel that received Jesus's blood. By blood, they were talking about bloodline, and that Mary Magdalene was the mother of his children. The program used Da Vinci's painting of the last supper as support for their theory. In the painting, which supposedly contained representative information of the secrets that Da Vinci was given by the secret cabal, the program promulgated the notion that the person sitting to the right of Jesus was not the disciple John, but was indeed a woman who was Mary Magdalene. I found myself agreeing that the image to the right of Jesus in the painting sure looked more like a woman than a man. Particularyly when the other images in the painting that were supposed to be men did look like men except for this one figure. An interview with a so-called Da Vinci art expert pointed out how the figure purported to be Mary Magdalene was leaning to the right in the painting, and that her leaning to the right and Jesus's image turned to the left formed a V(Vee) which an ancient symbol for the human female. It also represents a container or vessel, and when put together seems to infer that the Holy Grail was Mary herself, instead of being a drinking cup.

The entire time I was watching this program I was remembering a documentary about the Popel in which it was stated that John Paul did not pray to either God or Jesus, but to Mary as Jesus's mother. This suggest to me that the highly touted virgin birth did not concern itself with the birth of the physical Jesus, but of the docetic spirit that was born unto the personality Jesus, and may represent the continued worship of the old female Goddesses, which was being suppressed in the Jewish tribes at the time Jesus was around.

This female Goddess adoration is much older than the Jewish concept of Jehovah, and was predominant throughout the Mid-East and the Greek states well before the Judaic tribes were formed. This seems to substaniate to some degree that Christianity did not spring from the Jews and the Mosaic Law traditions, but from the old Greek oral tradition of a female God.

In my dreams I have a seemingly female companion. She is always there as a witness. I haven't been able to look at her directly, as yet, and identify her. I thought for a long time that she was my second wife because she has dark hair. I taught my ex-wife how to astral travel and we did a lot of work together in that regard. But, now I'm not so sure. Yesterday morning as I was waking up I found myself calling her Linda. I don't know whether or not that was a fluke, and it may end up being a distraction. It is, however, the first time I am conscious of that I have had any clue as to her identity. Maybe she is my anima, but I find that a little confusing because there is another woman in my dream life that is a fair-haired beauty that shows up now and then.

I have been involved recently in a drawn out discussion about description, and the various languages and lingos humans use to say what they perceive. My most recent conclusion, that the various descriptive efforts we make to communicate the ineffable fall short of actually getting the satisfaction we require from such efforts, is truly an exercise in futility. Yet, I continue to make such efforts despite myself. I wonder how surprised I'll be if it ever happens?

This is just ridiculous. I just wrote out this long piece about my feelings in regard to how Christianity has played a role in my life, and as I went to post it the whole damn thing went away. I wasn't as pissed as I thought I'd be. It only took a moment before I realized I wasn't supposed to put that entry online.

I did seem to learn something from what I wrote. I learned what I'm willing to believe and what I'm not willing to believe. A lot has happened to my philosopy since I learned that the origin of Christianity was not from Judaic sources, but from the classic Greek era. Another aspect of this learning was that I found I was able to accept a docetic Christ, whereas the idea of worshipping a man as God just doesn't work for me.

I look in the mirror each day now to see if I look a little slimmer. I know I am slimmer because my old pants now fit pretty comfortably when I put them on. I've still got bulges that do not please me, but I know this new way of eating I've adopted is working for me. It's pretty easy on me too, because I eat as much as I want to without going hungry. Back in my twenties and thirties I used to go on frequent fasts that lasted anywhere from three days to thirty days. Doing this had a tendency to make me feel as if I were making a great spiritual effort to do what was necessary to access a state of physical and mental ecstasy. This happened quite frequently in those days, but doesn't seem all that important to me now.

I have a voice I hear occasionally that only seems to come when I need to stop doing something and won't take steps to bring things to a halt. This voice has spoken to me at important times in my life. Usually it speaks one sentence and then I don't hear it again for a long time. A few months ago it told me that I had graduated from the need to make the efforts to bring ecstasy into my life. I suspect my lifelong seeking is about over. I made full circle since my first doubts about my religious beliefs came into play at around the time I moved into puberty. This seeking dominated me for a very long time. I didn't or couldn't accept that it would ever end. Presently, I think it has.

I sat with some friends who visited me the other day and found myself explaining my thirty year addiction to using the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the Book of Changes. They politely indulged me as I went through the various reasons I thought I had done this. It wasn't until last night as I lay dreaming that I thought about what I had told them.

What impressed me about this was that I had questioned many of the decisions and actions I initiated in my life for a very long time. Presently, I have no idea why I did this thing.

I was aware during this period of how simply using this oracle was detrimental to me. But, even more detrimental was the effect this habit had on those around me. It was as if I needed the permission of this very esoteric book to love them or believe a single word they said to me. I questioned the motivations of my friends as if they were possibly my enemies. Mostly, however, I questioned my own self as if I might be my own worst enemy. More often than I liked, it turned out that I was.

One of the most ridiculous questions I ask of the I Ching was the time when I had a bicycle accident and landed head first in the side of a mountain in Kentucky going thirty miles an hour and was literally seeing stars. My wife of that time who was riding her own bike came to where I lay and wanted to call an ambulance to take me to the hospital. I knew I was hurt, but the first thing I wanted to do was ask the oracle if I needed to go to the emergency room. As if the blood and the stars I was seeing was not enough evidence to show us it was a very good idea.

I worked as an industrial pipefitter and welder during much of this time. That's how I got the money for us to live on. Whether or not I took a particular job depended on the response I got from the oracle. No matter how broke we were or even if we had no food to eat. This habit took us to ridiculous places that no husband and father of any compassion and responsibility would allow. Finally, I surmise, my use of the Book of Changes was directly responsible for the breakup of our marriage and the loss of the presence of my own children from that marriage. I haven't seen them for over twenty years. It's my own fault. Why would it not be?

Then, one night about two years ago, a deep voice told me, "Stop using the I Ching." I woke up knowing that this was what I was supposed to do, and after a few weeks of not wanting to believe that I should stop, I did. After thirty years, it was over.

What I told my friends the other night finally came home to roost with me. The thing about what I told them was that I had questioned myself so deeply for so long a period of time. I don't know if the doing of this is a blessing or a curse. One thing I do know is that I can't go back and change my life. I can review it and reframe it to a more palatable memory, but I can't change the effect it had on those who were near and dear to me. Their memories, whatever those memores are, will stay the same. Since we haven't communicated very much at all since I drove them out of my life, and probably never have the opportunity before the event of my death, it probably doesn't matter one way or the other that I did what I did or that they think of me as they do. Whatever that is.

Sitting around waiting to die seems perfectly absurd when I'm perfectly healthy. The people in my natal family seem to live long lives. If I sit and wait for the occasion of my death for as long as it took my father to die, I will have to wait for another twenty three years. My mother is still alive. I expect to die with callouses on my ass.

I was pretty impressed by the PBS show Nova last night. They had a program on string theory. I have read a little on this, but nothing definitive. I was much more pleased with having the video content giving animated examples of what they were talking about.

I love getting sarcastic about SCIENCE. I attempt to keep up with what's new. Especially about the digital world. It took me a long time to realize that mathematics is just another description language, and that physicists are just as prone to tell tall tales as people who use words to offer descriptions. I'm even more convinced after seeing the string theory show that "scientists" create the "discoveries" they come up with. P.T.Barnum was right. There is a fool born every minute of the day.

Of course, when I have food in my belly and a place to get out of the weather to sleep, what else is there to do but create stuff to amuse oneself.

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I had a long talk yesterday with an old friend. We had a little tiff a while back and had not talked for a long time. We seem to stimulate each other to deeper insights about the things we talk about.

One of the subjects we got into was considering our total life experience as one huge data field, and that this data field surrounds us much like some holographic electron cloud in what all our experiences can appear in holgraphic form in which it can be accessed by our mental software. The analogy we used was that it existed as something similar to data mining software like large corporations use to go through their corporate data bases to find trends they can take advantage of to better their products and service, and to find more productive ways of marketing.

There is another element besides the data field and the mining software, and that's the operator that first accumulated the data in the data field, and who decides what can be done with the efficiency of the software they have available to them.

Both of us appeared to agree that we have enough data in the data field that no real effort is necessary to get more data in there. Data gathering, at this stage of the game is something that happens as a result of habits that have been put in place a long time ago. We even talked about whether or not other data fields that come from former existences could not be mined.

The real work probably needs to be done in the area of the data mining software, and how the operator chooses what topics that software should mine for to get the desired results the operator decides will get him the most useful information.

My friend had an unusual experience Friday a week ago that seems to have changed the way he looks at life. This experience was brought about in the presence of another friend who provided the means for this experience to come about. I had been told about this event previously, but my experience with this fellow I talked with had not lead me to think that such a change was possible, but after our long conversation yeasterday I am convinced the desired changes actually did take place. Maybe not as fully as they could, but strong changes did occur and can be further implimented by the same such experiences in the future. I could not be more delighted for him.

One of the more difficult sentences for me to say sometime is, "I don't know". Formulating an opinion about just about any subject or topic that comes to my doorway seems awfully easy for me to do. Like many people I enjoy being the center of attention at times. Other times I just wanna melt into the woodworks and disappear without having to commit myself to taking a position on wot seems controversial at best, and at the very least a question of political expediency. Getting old seems to have provided me with opportunities in both directions.

I have been blessed with a good memory for some subjects. I think it has to do with pattern recognition more than anything else. I don't remember things verbatim. Just the pattern the information takes. I can remember what people write in discussion groups, and if they cater a different perspective, say for the sake of political expediency, I remember what they have committed to previously and point that out. Sometime I remember vague references for years.

I used to take great pride in pointing out the other's inconsistencies, and it was a source of pleasure to me to point their inconsistencies out coupled with a little sarcasm to twist the knife. This little pleasure can be costly though, and in the past, I appear to have alienated the good will of people I truly admired.

I got fascinated by the system of thinking inherent in the Chinese classic The Book of Changes (I Ching) for a long time. It is also considered a book of wisdom. There are many quotable metaphors used in the Emperor's Yellow Book version translated by Richard Wilhelm, and it is not unusual for me to offer up my favorite quotes from that source.

The use of my memores to play games with other people's inconsistencies keeps bringing one particular quote to mind in this regard, "The superior man lets many things pass without being duped."

Since the stated aim of the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the Book of Changes is to learn to live a life which does not incur blame, it teaches caution as the main attribute of living a life of no blame.

The necessary caution in regard to my sarcastic use of memory probably means that I should allow my noticing the other's inconsistencies to remain unspoken and unwritten without being duped into a response at all. I guess this has to do with the Book of Changes reputation for teaching statescraft.

It seems like when it rains it pours. I was moving my indoor TV antenna around last night to try to get better reception on the three channels I recieve. The cable that lead to my computer monitor, which has a TV tuner in it, was all tangled up with all the other cables for my computer, and it seemed like the best thing to do was to unplug the cable from the monitor and pull it free of the tangle mass of other cables. I noticed when I unhooked it from the monitor that the connectors were not tight. So, when I unraveled it and reconnected I made sure I tightened up the connector nut. When I did that I started receiving many more stations including the UHF stations I didn't receive previously. Now I can get 10-12 stations fairly clear. This hadn't happened in over a year.

The biggest thrill in this happening was that this gave me a lot more variety than I had previously. I found a really clear public educational channel, while mostly boring, do have some documentaries I enjoy. Mostly, however, I found that I receive a Spanish language station. Many Latinos now live in North Carolina, and I found to my delight that one of the UHF channels had converted to Spanish.

Without understanding very much at all, I watched that station the rest of the night. For the first time in my life I can sit in my home and watch the facial expressions and hear the rhythms of people speaking Spanish. This development could give me incentive to study Spanish with a little more vigor now.

I have never really wanted to study Spanish academically. I just wanted to understand what people are saying and perhaps learn to speak interactively with Spanish speakers. The academic aspects of learning this language doesn't really appeal to me.

I have traveled considerably in Mexico without possessing enough Spanish to ask directions about how to get where I wanted to go. I have always had to depend on someone else to interpret for me. This dependency has been uncomfortable to say the least, and it has nearly gotten me put in a Mexican prison for activities I didn't even participate in, because I didn't know what was going on.

Now, with the chance to see and hear Spanish being used in the programs that I receive on the TV, I think I will be able to pick up more and more expressions that might help me to do what I need to do to get proficient in this language.

In the past, as I thought about the small amount of money I get from Social Security, I had thought I might move to one of the countries south of here so that my money would go further. But, when I retired and started getting my checks, my lack of Spanish has made me think about the feasibility of making this happen. I felt sure that if I picked up and went to live in Mexico that I would eventually pick the language up just by being surrounded by it, and by the necessity of having to use it to communicate with Spanish speakers. But, I didn't do that. The chance of my ignorance being taken advantage of by unsavory characters caused hesitation. Now, maybe all this will change.

I'm enjoying the Fall weather. Like Spring, it surprises me each year.

I have seen a lot of stuff written about love. I find it really astounding that strangers on the e-mail circuit profess to love people they have never seen in their life. It seems obvious that we are not possessed by the same definition of what love is. I wrote a paragraph that defines my present attitude toward love.

"Love is not a possession that I can dispense or receive as it were a commodity to be bought or sold by works. It is not something I earn or attempt to make others earn or feel by words or actions of preference. Love is not to be found in ex-is-tense, but in abandonment to the is-ness that awaits beyond passion."

I guess I'm attempting to state that love exists beyond humanity's effort to make it into what they want or need it to be. That it lies beyond desire. What I have experienced as love seems to be that way. Love seems to be a state of being I enter when the conditions are congruent. Of course, this is just my personal opinion. Maybe love is a little like pain. We gnow it when it's there for us, and when we attempt to remember it or conjure it forth to comfort us it doesn't come or go at our bidding. I don't write that with any assurance that I'm wright or wrong about this, it's just what I sense is the way it works with me. I am certainly not prepared to argue with people about what love is.

I do think love emerges when we occupy the specious present. Looking for love, in all the wrong places or no, it appears to show up in my life at random. Love doesn't seem to be something that can be cast aside. Maybe it can be ignored, but at a cost I'm not really willing to pay.

I have married two different women. I write that they were different, but I don't appear to be all that sure about it. Sometime I think that both women became what I needed them to be when we were together. After we separated I experiences many moments of negativity. These moments had a tendency to wonder if I really loved them in spite of the fact that I had declared many times that I didn't know what love is.

I regretted our breaking up in both cases, and in both cases I assume it was me that was at fault. Like when I left my natal family and went off to join the Navy to get away from their control of my activities, I didn't seem to be able to live like I wanted to live because of a sense of duty to them. My sense of duty was carefully constructed from childhood. Marriage was promulgated as a condition that required me to act toward our marriage as if it were a duty, but duty or not I did not feel bound to marriage as something sacred that would be a sin for me to walk away from. To me, duty is just another conceptual construct that is intended as a guide rather than a necessity.

Both of the women that I married were intelligent and both were more educated than I was. They both made more money in their professions than I did. They didn't seem concerned with this, and I was only concerned when other people made it a point to bring it up. In reflection, I sense that they needed me to have less to contribute than they did. Both were perfectly capable of raising our children alone. I have often wondered if this wasn't part of the tacit agreement we shared even before we got married.

Like living with my parents as a kid, I had my own way of doing things. I had my own interests. I don't seem all that sure that I chose my interests, or even that my interests were chosen for me.

It didn't make much difference about leaving my first marriage, or forcing my second wife to leave me. My entire marriage life to both women seemed arranged by a force outside of myself even as it appeared as though we both made the decision. They were and still are very strong women. They seem more masculine than many of the women I have known. They were both born under masculine astrological signs, whereas I was born under a feminine sign. They were both aggressive and I more passive. Both of them approached me for relationship and it only appeared in some ways that I was taking the lead in our relationship.

I don't gnow that I really abandoned my children. On sheer physical evidence alone it might seem that way, but from my perspective after having suffered much because in their absence, it's almost as if it were destined to be that way from the beginning or even prior to our marriage. I think I was meant to be alone, and they were supposed to learn to deal with life without the daily influence of a father. I am alone and they were raised for the most part without the interference of my input. I haven't seen any of them for a long time, and the children of my second marriage since they were taken by their mother some twenty odd years ago. I was told by my youngest brother that I have a grandson by my youngest daughter. I don't expect to ever see him. He's better off that way. I don't and it appears that I never will play by society's rules in this regard. I don't think that the way I conduct my affairs is a particularly good way for most people to live, and yet, it is exactly what I'm supposed to do to get what I want out of life.