Posts in the “personal” category

October, 2024: After Donald Trump recently stated that he hated to pay overtime and would try not pay it, almost every union in the United States has come out in support of the Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.

This includes the UAW, AFL-CIO, IAM Union, IATSE, American Federation of Teachers, National Education Association, United Steelworkers, the Teamsters Union in many states, the Machinists Union, the AFSCME, and many more. I’d link to them all, but the page where I found this image shows many of the unions that suppported Harris BEFORE Trump said he hated overtime pay.

As I read this NY Times article about What ‘The Apprentice’ Gets Exactly Right About Trump, these lines from Donald Trump’s “The Art of the Deal” ghostwriter really stick out:

“The first lesson is that a lack of conscience can be a huge advantage when it comes to accruing power, attention and wealth in a society where most other human beings abide by a social contract. The second lesson is that nothing we get for ourselves from the outside world can ever adequately substitute for what we’re missing on the inside.”

This is a short collection of quotes from Rumi:

My religion is love.
Love is the bridge between you and everything.
Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.
Be a witness, not a judge.
You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens.
I am not this hair, I am not this skin, I am the soul that lives within.
Wear gratitude like a cloak and it will feed every corner of your life.
Past and future veil God from our sight; burn up both of them with fire.

Here are some Northern Lights, as seenin Louisville, Kentucky, in October, 2024.

If you’re interested in mindfulness and meditation, this scene from “Star Wars: Rogue One” demonstrates mantra meditation at its best: Belief, total commitment and single-mindedness, and practice in action.

A few related quotes:

“You must concentrate upon and consecrate yourself wholly to each day, as though a fire were raging in your hair.”
~ Zen Master Taisen Deshimaru

A “Love” sign you might find at a rest area somewhere in Virginia.

“Swami Vivekananda says that if you have ever felt the urge to stretch out your arms in trying to embrace the universe, you have felt the truth. Not one atom in this universe, not one insect, not one life here is different from you. It is you yourself. It is one life and one consciousness. It is a joy, an enormous creativity of the consciousness which shines in all these ways. When you experience the universe, you are tasting yourself!”

~ Swami Sarvapriyananda, Dissolve into Infinity

“Just as water wears away stone over time, daily practice thins the veil of illusion.”

~ Ram Dass, in Polishing The Mirror

Pete Rose was Charlie Hustle. All these years later, and the the game hasn't seen another player like him. RIP, Pete, October, 2024.

Last night I passed out for the 10th time. As usual, I woke up in the middle of the night, and knew that I felt really bad. I ran to the bathroom to splash cold water on my face, and knew I was going to pass out before I could get the Benadryl open. So I got back into bed and passed out.

Of course, when you pass out, you never know if you’ll wake up again, but so far I’m 10 for 10.

A unique thing about this event is that I was hit very hard in the top-right part of my head in the afternoon, and still have that pain today. I suspect that it had to do with this syncope event.

As a little yoga/savasana tip, here’s a collection of 50+ phrases you can use to help relax and focus, both before and during savasana.

Please note that I don’t know the original source of all these quotes. I had a few yoga instructors back in the day, so I got a collection of the quotes from them.

October 5, 2024: When I started to wake up this morning I clearly heard two men talking.

It started when the first man — who turned out to be an older man — sighed pretty deeply, and then the second man asked him what that was about. I assumed that the second man was his son or grandson.

The old man replied, “Do you ever notice that when you sigh, you’re doing the right thing?”

The younger man said he didn’t know what that meant. I thought the same thing.

So the old man said, “Well, you’ve been thinking about something, and now you’re about to do the right thing, but for one reason or another you don’t want to do it. But now you’ve decided to do that right thing, so you let out a sigh before you do it.”

I tried to stay there to here more of the conversation, but I could not, because I was waking up too fast.

I can’t find the original source of this image and product, but I have always liked the “Live Brave” saying, which I first heard on the excellent Eli Stone tv series (which stars Johnny Lee Miller, who may be more well known for the movie Hackers and of course, Elementary).

“What you allow is what will continue.”

(I found this at a url that is no longer available.)

“I love everybody, that’s what’s killing me.” Cloris Leachman was outstanding in the movie Spanglish, and this is one of my favorite lines. I’ve written about this line and loving everyone from a Buddhist perspective before, and if you’ve ever loved two people and seen them fighting with each other, or loved two people and had to disappoint one person because of something related to the other person, that’s what this reminds me of.

In 2024, it also reminds me of war, and what a waste of life it is when people who are in charge ruthlessly kill other people.

For the person in your life who constantly says, “I worry ...”

“It’s better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing, than a long life spent in a miserable way.” ~ Alan Watts

In a dream this morning
I’m pushing a little unpowered vacuum/sweeper
like you see them use at Denny’s
or maybe Cracker Barrel.

And then I look up
and see two young girls
and they’re singing a pretty song.

I ask what the song is
and they giggle a little,
and one asks the other
if they should tell me,
and she says yes.

So they tell me that there’s this
old abandoned house
and sometimes when they go by it
they see an old woman pushing
a sweeper like this.

I did a “gratitude” meditation exercise two nights ago, and it ended up going almost four hours. (Fortunately for me, at advanced levels you can trade some meditation time for sleep.)

The technique is to put your mind in the area of your heart and express things you’re thankful for, including this crazy body I have, all of you, and in the end, basically everything.

If it helps you can start by feeling love for one being — such as Zeus — and work out from there.

A soul that temporarily has a body

At some point it really hits you that I’m some soul that’s pushing this vehicle that was named “Alvin” around, and YOU are also some other individual soul. So when YOU don’t do what I want, that’s okay, because you’re another student here in Earth School. Basically, MY soul needs to give YOUR soul that freedom to work your stuff out.

I don’t watch many movies or tv shows, at least not as many as most people. The reason I don’t is because I experience lucid dreams most night that Hollywood can’t compare to. I don’t know why I have these dreams, but I have had them since I was a young child, and that’s just the way things are. This story from May 2, 2022, is just one example.

~~~

There was a bomb in the building.

Somehow I knew that.

I remember walking into a government-style building that had a parking lot directly in front of it. If you walked into the front doors, went down the hallway to the right, and then took your first left, there was a device on the floor that looked like a boxy, 1970s-style tape recorder, but it was really a bomb.

So I began working with a friend to evacuate the building. He went one way, I went the other.

As I ran around the building, Lori — my friend who died last summer — ran up to me and said in a panic, “He knows everything about you. Everything! You have to run.” I looked at her and tried to make sense of how she was here and what she was saying, but she was terrified and screamed, “RUN!” Then she ran away in the direction I had just come from.