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.

I am perfectly aware that I have neglected writing an entry lately. To those who have reminded me of it, you have not really been ignored. I seem to be going through some sort of major change in the last six months or so.

For one thing I seem to have lost interest in some of the activities I have indulged in the past. I think one of the reasons this change is coming about simply has to do with my lack of contact with real people. I don't have the feedback I got in the past that seems necessary to keep certain interests going.

A couple of days ago I unsubbed from the Gospel of Thomas discussion list I participated in for 1-2 years. It just got to be boring. I subbed there in the first place because it seemed like a indirect way to deal with my early religious instruction.

Religion had been such an explosive topic for me since the onset of puberty, and I felt like it was time to deal with my anger about it. Being on that list really opened my eyes to a lot of what troubled me in my Southern Baptist upbringing. I "gnew" that I was being lied to. I sensed something was terribly amiss about what I was being told and forced to learn.

I learned a lot from the other members of the list. In the end, it was the total lack of moderator responsibility that caused me to let it go.

This suprised me a little. Freedom of Speech has allowed me to explore my interest in all sorts of areas. I never thought I would want to be on a moderated list, but the Gospel of Thomas list was not so much about freedom of speech as it was total anarchy. Some of the list members seemed more interested in the historical aspect of the early christians, and wrote volumes of weird, hoky stuff that had nothing to do with what the Gnostic Gospels were about.

The message was totally ignored in favor of the need of some of the members need to feel important about their own idea of scholarship. They are not scholars, but good old country boys who missed their calling.

One old guy who considered himself to be a true Catholic went on and on about church dogma that was the most translucent crap I had ever read. Then, there was his ex-girlfriend who was one of the most crude frenetic bitches I personally encountered in the various discussion groups I have subbed to. The moderators did kick her off the list a few times, but she would just change e-mail addresses and continue as if nothing happened. The dialogue just went away after the moderators got so lazy they let her stay on under one name or the other. All she was there for was to beg her old boyfriend to come back to her, and her remarks made it blatantly obvious why he never will. No blame.

Now I'm subbed to another group I have grown to enjoy writing with. I'm very impressed with the woman who moderates the list. She has a way with words that really hits the spot with me, and she keeps the fundamentalist fringe element at bay with what would appear to exist as very little effort. Truth is, the list members really don't know how much trouble she has to go to. It just doesn't. No telling what she has to go through off list.

She has a health problem that has caused her some problems lately and she was in the hospital for a while. Now she seems to be back in form somewhat and I'm really glad for her and for her admirers. I'm certainly one of those.

Our little town now has a Lowe's store that just opened. Gives us a little more choice about where we can shop. I have spent a couple of hours just browsing around since it opened to see what they've got to sell. It's really convenient to my house and will be easy to get things home if and when I buy them. I guess I don't have any good excuse not to do a little work on my rathole some call a house now, except for not having much money to spend on it. It doesn't matter. No one sees it but the people who love me and have decided to forgive me for being whatever it is that I am.

I've been trying to write an entry about how I adopted the personality I hide behind for some time now. It's not as easy as stream of consciousness writing. It took the better part of two hours for me to describe the baby crib I spent the first four and a half years I spent my childhood sleeping in. I hope to edit it down to a paragraph or two. That crib was the place I had numerous "first experiences" in. It was the place where lots of root ideas got drummed into my head. If I can get through that part of it, maybe the rest of what I'm attempting to describe will flow more easily.