The Blogosphere

The other night on the Colbert Report a guest was complaining about all the bloggers out there putting out information with no expertise or credentials to back up the information. To me, it parallels that fact that people are using the internet like a community; a post to a blog would be like making the same statement with your family & friends sitting around you in your living room. There is certainly a time and a place for journalism and national media, but the internet has spawned the growth of the "community." Not every opinion on a blog is valid, reasonable, or logical, but that is the reality the living room conversation. I think it is appropriate to see what are the communities saying, versus what the "experts" are saying. Isn't that what happens in our everyday lives anyway? We talk among ourselves and, in doing so, forge relationships, strengthen our opinions, and refine our views. Then we turn on the news & hope to get the "rest of the story."

Nothing wrong with that!

My Personal Business Card

Business Card Pic, originally uploaded by Chrissy Mc.

Just created a personal business card today for my blog! I'm sure there's a catchy little word for a business card that's not for business...anyway, here it is, and now you've seen it! I'm feeling like being creative today...finding new music, wanting to make things, and not wanting to do necessary work!

Yogaville

I officially started my yoga teacher training Monday night. I think this is just the perfect time and place for me to study the ancient art of clearing the mind in order to find your place in the universe. In preparation, I started fasting on Sunday morning, taking water only, and finally ended my fast tonight. I do feel sharper in the senses and more alert, and hopefully my body is purged of some built-up junk. I am about 10 pounds lighter than usual, thanks to my vegetarian diet and the recent fast. Hopefully I can maintain that with my daily yoga practice. It's great to be learning again...

Life Task

So I'm lying here in bed thinking about why I'm going back to school. Wondering what I'll do with my expensive, new knowledge...so I decided to try to put into words what I hope to accomplish in life.

My goal is to find a job where I can do something noble and honorable with my time and talents.

I want to use my unique skills to improve situations that others complain about. I suppose this is why engineering made sense to me. But I found that solving oil-field facility-related problems wasn't motivating enough for me. I am drawn to wanting to improve the situations of PEOPLE (which was actually a small part of improving oil-field facilities...making the operators happy is what made me happy).

But am I best equipped to improve people's lives one-on-one, say with massage, psychology, or social work, or am I better equipped to do this on a large scale - say with politics, diplomacy, or writing?

What are my talents? What are my skills?

1. Relating to People Different from Me: I learned by traveling to Pakistan and by befriending foreign exchange students in high school and college that I have a high capacity to relate to people across cultural boundaries. I am genuinely interested in people.
2. Interest in Learning
3. Drive to Solve Problems
4. Able to Bring people together to find Solutions
5. Drive to Teach & Share Knowledge
6. Writing - This skill has gone downhill since college, but I think I still have the knack for organizing words somewhere in my brain

Through all of this analysis, I hope to come closer to realizing what it is I'm fit to do. And it may be that I never achieve more than being an example to a few others of a decent human being trying to live an honorable, noble, yet, normal, householder life. And that would be fine with me. But I feel burdened that I may actually have skills and talents to improve millions of lives, and I'm not using them, and that makes me sad and anxious. It seems self-important and naive just to see that written on the screen, but I actually feel that way in my 27-year-old brain.

So I'll go back to school, hoping to take some small step on the path of self-realization and service to others, and continue trying to reach out the only way I currently know how: on a one-by-one basis.

Cats

Let me tell you the story of two cats--one named Beautiful, one named Ugly. Neither one have English names, though, they go by Belle and Fea. Fea is my cat:


Belle is the senior cat at the house, with about 13 years and no teeth left. She drools when you pet her, and she wants to be petted constantly.

Anyhow, there is a lesson in the way Belle chose to interact with my cat Fea. We took over Belle's room when we moved into this house. So after we had fully moved in, Belle would come in the room too, like it was nobody's business, and just hop up on the bed, even with Fea 1-foot's distance away. Now, Fea does not play well with other cats. She is young and testy and dominant, and hisses when other animals come near her. So it was quite a sight to watch Belle jump up into Fea's space and watch her totally ignore Fea's hissing and baring of teeth and claws. Belle reacted to Fea as if she didn't hear a thing. It was like there wasn't another cat in the room, and eventually, Fea just gave up. It was like watching a mother ignore a child that is acting up just to get their way. So now these two cats live happily in harmony because of Belle's reaction to Fea. Pretty cool.

PBS

"Wisdom is knowing you are nothing; Love is knowing you are everything; you live your life in-between."

~Dr. Wayne Dyer, from a teacher he knew in Bombai

Not the Virgin Mary or Little Jesus

Not the Virgin Mary or Little Jesus, originally uploaded by Chrissy Mc.

There is something disturbing to me about this outdoor mosaic that I pass everyday on the way to work. It used to be the Virgin Mary & Jesus, but obviously the new owners moved in with new ideas.

Where I'm from, people wear masks or cover their faces if: (1) They have a case of hives, (2) it's Halloween, or (3) they're going to rob a liquor store. I have trouble picturing this scene as a display of tradition or modesty. To me it just looks a little ominous.

While intriguing, it feels to me almost as disturbing as a cartoon of Mohammad would to a Muslim (and I'm not even Catholic!). Weird.

The Soul, Reincarnation, Heaven, Peace

I had some thoughts today on the soul, reincarnation, and heaven while in the shower and eating at McDonald's (not at the same time, of course)!

I've been able to follow Yogic philosophy (largely inspired by Hindu beliefs & Indian sages) up until the talks of karma and reincarnation. The idea that every person has a unique soul just doesn't sit well with me. That would imply that every manifestation of life has its own soul...each clump of grass, each rock, each animal...unless, of course, you buy into the philosophy that humans are somehow special and only we got the souls in all of creation (not likely given the scale of US on the scale of CREATION).

The fact that we each have a feeling of knowing who we are after peeling back all physical and memory associations simply implies that we are expressions of ONE soul. In fact, you DON'T feel drastically different & unique if you take everything you know about yourself away.

I don't have thousands of years of philosophy under my belt yet, but at this moment in time, I believe that the idea of karma is just a convenient way to explain injustice and hurt in the world; that we must have done something bad in a past life to explain why we have to suffer in this one. But why can't good and evil be random, and not polar opposites that must be balanced in the scale of time?

It's true that good and selfless deeds seem to bring prosperity...you reap what you sow, in general. But to extend that beyond one lifetime is challenging for me to justify. In science, we know that evolution does not always mean progression; sometimes biological evolution means regression. The only goal of evolutionary adaptations is to further life in any form, not to grow toward one ultimate expression of life.

All religions seem to focus on a person becoming more and more pure and good, with the ultimate goal being peaceful and joyful immortality (as opposed to tortuous fire & brimstone immortality, or coming back as something else immortality). But why must this require lifetimes (or just one lifetime) of progression? Perhaps it is in our competitive or contriving human natures to think that there is some kind of goal to be acheived while existing. As if it weren't hard enough just trying to stay ALIVE, we must also acheive some kind of PURPOSE in life.

What if the goal in life was just to live? Religion must be an adaptation in an of itself. Ethics and morals and how-to-live stories must lead to more stable, prosperous societies.

Which brings me to the subject of peace on earth. A silly concept if I ever heard one! (And I live in San Francisco!) Even if everyone who could possibly antagonize you and disrupt your peace was wiped from the face of the earth, nature itself would be your friend one moment and your enemy the next. Can you negotiate with nature? Can you say to the lightning, or to the tornado "Let's just be friends?" You could, but they would laugh at you like Montanans laugh at idealistic Californians.

The best you can hope for is inner peace, which will serve you in prolonging your life, protecting you from stress-related diseases and from retribution for rash, angry, or violent actions you would otherwise perpetrate against others, who are actually just you in another form.

Check back in 4 months to see how/if my views on this have changed!

The Illusion of Reality

"And now, because the soul acts at a distance by some power that belongs to it, are we authorized to conclude that it exists as something real, and that it is not the result of functions of the brain?

"Does light really exist?

"Does heat exist?

"Does sound exist?

"No.

"They are only manifestations produced by movement.

"What we call light is a sensation produced upon our optic nerve by the vibrations of ether, comprising between 400 and 756 trillions per second, undulations that are themselves very obscure.

"What we call heat is a sensation produced by vibrations between 350 and and{sic} 600 trillions.

"The sun lights up space, as much at midnight as at midday. Its temperature is nearly 270 degrees below zero.

"What we call sound is a sensation produced upon our auditory nerve by silent vibrations of the air, themselves comprising between 32,000 and 36,000 a second.

From "The Unknown." Published by Harper & Brothers Copyright, 1900, by Camille Flammarion. (French Astronomer)

Technical Issues

Apparently my website host had 2 servers crash, and they lost all my data, and didn't have the nerve to tell me! So...my website has been down in the past week while I switched hosting service to godaddy.com.

Hopefully the website will be mostly functional...please let me know if you find any glitches. I just got it back up and running today.

Stay tuned!