Posts in the “personal” category

the small man
builds cages for everyone
he
knows,
while the sage,
who has to duck his head
when the moon is low,
keeps dropping keys all night long
for
the
beautiful
rowdy
prisoners.

~ an old Persian named Hafez

As a brief note today, I have tried quite a few different styles of meditation over the last 10-20 years, and I want to make a note of them here. I’m going to start by listing the meditation teachers I know, write a little bit about each one, and then at the end I’ll try to summarize these teachings.

As a personal “note to self,” here are a few thoughts I’ve had lately, both when I was awake and also while I was asleep (which happens quite often to me in lucid dreams):

FIRST:  While meditating on the sounds of birds chirping outside this morning, I was in a terrific state, and then each time I heard a bird chirp, my body shook or jerked in response to the sound. That was new, but I think it’s a good thing. (Shaking, jerking, or other involuntary movements during meditation are referred to as kriyas or energetic releases, and are believed to be due to energy release, a relaxation response, emotional release, and/or nervous system adjustments. Sometimes I also come out of deep meditation sessions to find my teeth chattering.)

If you’re interested in meditation but “don’t have the time for it,” this quote from Daniel Ingram on intensity in meditation/mindfulness practice was helpful to me:

“It is important to know that really getting into a sense of the breath as a continuous entity for ten seconds will do you more good than being with the breath on and off for an hour.”

“Have you got any cookies?”

~ Frank Burns, in M*A*S*H

If you’d like to see a blast from the past — like from about 40 years ago — here’s an old mug/tumbler from the Sundance Club in College Station, Texas, circa 1986 or so.

If you happened to go to school at Texas A&M back then, you may recall the Sundance Club, which was a nightclub in the Hilton Hotel. The last I heard, the hotel was converted into a dormitory, but I don’t know if that’s true or not.

I’ve always wondered about the meaning of the song Levon, as performed by Elton John, with lyrics written by Bernie Taupin. After researching this for a while, this is what I’ve been able to find out about the meaning of Levon.

Elton John on Levon’s meaning

The best information I’ve found comes from the songfacts website. There, one contributor states the following:

This is an ongoing blog post about “making the switch” from Google AdSense to Ezoic in 2024. If you’re just interested in updates over time, see the “Updates” section at the bottom of this article.

Switching from AdSense to Ezoic

For a long time I was afraid to switch to another company besides AdSense because I had not heard of Ezoic and others, but after several weeks on their platform, I’m happy to say that all is well.

I should also say that in my defense, I was also busy with other things in life, and I thought that “making the switch” might take a while, but if you have existing AdSense and Analytics accounts, it doesn’t seem to take too long. The actual time I spent on a computer to make the changes was probably about 4-8 hours overall, but in calendar time it took a few days because of the AdSense and Analytics integration (waiting), and a few other configuration things I had to wait for. (So, several days in calendar time, but 4-8 hours in actual time.)

It’s also important to note that Ezoic is an AdSense partner, which I discuss more below.

I don’t know why they don’t work, but last night for about the 100th or 1,000th time I was reminded that light switches don’t work in dreams.

We were hoping to see the northern lights here last night, so I was intentionally sleeping lightly, waking up every half hour or so. In one dream I looked out my bedroom windows, saw the lights, went out of the room to tell others that we could see the northern lights, tried to turn on a light switch, and it didn’t work. So I tried turning on other light switches, they didn’t work, and then I thought, “Gosh darn it, I’m asleep,” and I woke myself up.

On multiple occasions I have had a lucid dream where someone or something is pulling me by my feet, and they proceed to pull my feet up and into the air. On one occasion they had me hanging upside down like that, but on other occasions they have stopped, got stuck, or I have woken up.

The last time this happened was last week — mid-June, 2024 — and I think I now know what is happening. But I don’t want to share that until this happens again and I can confirm what I’m thinking.

(And if you’re interested in lucid dreams, another common one is where light switches don’t work in lucid dreams.)

Perhaps because of the sitar and the way they sing, I find it a little hard to understand the lyrics for the Beatles song, “Within You Without You”, so here are those lyrics:

We were talking about the space between us all
And the people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion
Never glimpse the truth, then it’s far too late, when they pass away

We were talking about the love we all could share
When we find it, to try our best to hold it there with our love
With our love, we could save the world, if they only knew

Try to realize it’s all within yourself
No one else can make you change
And to see you’re really only very small
And life flows on within you and without you

We were talking about the love that’s gone so cold
And the people who gain the world and lose their soul
They don’t know, they can’t see, are you one of them?

When you’ve seen beyond yourself then you may find
Peace of mind is waiting there
And the time will come when you see we’re all one
And life flows on within you and without you

When I was younger I didn’t really like The Beatles, though I did like individual songs by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of McCartney and The Beatles, and this quote from the Wikipedia’s A Day in the Life discussion is good:

“Paul and I were definitely working together, especially on ‘A Day in the Life’ that was a real ... The way we wrote a lot of the time: you’d write the good bit, the part that was easy, ‘I read the news today’ or whatever it was, then when you got stuck or whenever it got hard, instead of carrying on, you just drop it; then we would meet each other, and I would sing half, and he would be inspired to write the next bit and vice versa. He was a bit shy about it because I think he thought it’s already a good song. Sometimes we wouldn’t let each other interfere with a song either, because you tend to be a bit lax with someone else’s stuff, you experiment a bit. So we were doing it in his room with the piano. He said ‘Should we do this?’; ‘Yeah, let’s do that.’”

(Here’s a link to A Day in the Life on YouTube.)

(Dear Jackie Waller: I’m sorry, you were right, I would have liked the Beatles if I took the time to listen to them.)

I woke up a few nights ago dressed in a wedding gown. I didn’t know that at first; all I knew was that some lights outside were waking me up. So I got up, looked out a large glass window, and saw a large city at night outside the window. Then I realized I was dressed as a bride in a wedding, and the room had rose petals scattered all over the bed and floor.

Of course I was asleep and this was some sort of very realistic dream, and with that thought I woke up in bed as usual, gasping for air.

An important life lesson I learned somewhere along the line is that other people don’t think the way I do (and what a boring world it would be if they did).

As one example, when I started my business, I thought everyone else would want to be a co-owner, so I wanted to create it as an ESOP. But then I learned that a lot of good, talented co-workers didn’t want to be a co-owner, they just wanted to do their work and go home. (They had what you might call “a life outside of work.” 😁 )

I’m reminded of this because a friend keeps encountering a problem related to this: because they expect others to think and act the way they do, they inflict a lot of stress onto themself.

I don’t remember where the video was, but I saw a video with Shinzen Young where he mentioned that as we meditate, things come up from our subconscious, and even when we get old, we’ll eventually be able to remember things from when we were like ten years old. My specific note from the video is that “there is stuff propelling us from when we were ten years old.”

In a 2023 trip to New Mexico, I found out that The Sage Hotel in Santa Fe has bed bugs, and since then I’ve been trying to learn more about them. I asked ChatGPT, “What are bed bugs,” and got this answer (which I edited slightly for brevity and clarity):

Bed bugs are small, parasitic insects that feed on the blood of humans and animals. The common bed bug, Cimex lectularius, and the tropical bed bug, Cimex hemipterus, are the two main species that feed on humans. Bed bugs belong to the family Cimicidae and the order Hemiptera.

Key characteristics of bed bugs include:

• Size and appearance
• Feeding behavior
• Habitat
• Reproduction
• Resilience

Signs of a bed bug infestation include itchy welts or bites on the skin, small reddish-brown bugs on bedding or furniture, and dark spots (fecal matter) on surfaces.

See my Santa Fe bed bug report for images of actual bed bugs, courtesy of the Sage Inn in 2024.

I’m sorry, I don’t remember where I originally found this image, but I love this Ram Dass saying about being the witness:

“Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it.”

~ Ram Dass

From a Ram Dass article titled, Dying is Absolutely Safe.

I started reading the book Walking Each Other Home by Ram Dass and Mirabai Bush a few nights ago, and if you like Ram Dass, you’ll like this book. This is an image from early in the book about a “pretty fierce journey.”

Ram Dass FAQ: What is the best Ram Dass book to start with?

My answer: The best Ram Dass book to start with is ...

I wrote this in my earlier blog post, What Are The Best Books By Ram Dass, but I believe the best Ram Dass book to start with is Polishing The Mirror.

I think this book is the best summary of all his work. It’s a relatively short book, it’s clearly written, and summarizes much of what you’ll read in his other books. I started reading this when I was in the hospital, and as bad as I was feeling at the time, it just blew me away. I like to underline and highlight text, and I felt like I could highlight most of the book.