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.