Archive for the ‘Life Lessons’ Category

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Forty Nine

Wednesday, December 1st, 2010

Imagine cruising down the interstate enjoying the view through a big glass windshield. The stars are bright and your destination is miles away. You are driving along with out a care in the world. Everything is going well and you expect to arrive at your destination at exactly the scheduled time. Music plays softly in the background and the clatter of the engine combines with the roar of the tires on the pavement to allow you to settle deep into the warm comfortable driver’s seat.

Then suddenly your vision is blurred and glass shatters in front of you. A large lump of something lands in your lap as you try to control your bus and protect the precious cargo of passengers behind you. Someone has just gotten their jollies by dropping a large object from the bridge above you. You safely pull the bus to the side of the road and inspect the damage. Miraculously you are still alive. Just a few cuts and scrapes.

Glass is scattered through out your bus but none of the passengers are seriously injured. Everyone is OK but you will not make your destination on time. And your bus is going to need some serious repairs. It could have been worse. Like it was for a woman a few years ago who had a stone dropped through her from possibly the same bridge. She died from her injuries.

So it could be worse, but still it is pretty bad. What fun it must have been for the hoodlums who tossed the weight into the bus wind shield? Did they even get to see the crash in the darkness? A whole bus load of students returning from a trip are jolted from their peaceful ride by a senseless act.

This story is from this week’s news. A bus load of Lee University students was attacked as it cruised home on I 75 this week.

I read somewhere that life goes through seven year cycles. If so, then this is the end of my seventh cycle. Tomorrow I will be fifty.

I feel like this cycle of my life began with something crashing through the windshield of my life. I was comfortably cruising along in my career as an engineer for Westvaco Corporation. I had comfortable pay. I was good at what I did. People respected me and I was surrounded by friends. While there were many things I did not like about corporate life, I was very comfortable. I had challenges to keep my mind occupied and a comfortable office to go to each day. I was ready to cruise on auto pilot to retirement.

Then, suddenly, my dream was shattered. The plant I worked at was closed. There was some fall out but I was not really injured. Just a few scrapes. The impact reverberated through the other parts of my life.

Suddenly, I was faced with struggling for finances and not feeling very useful. Much of my self worth was wrapped up in being an engineer for Westvaco. When I was not that anymore, I felt like I was nothing.

I tried a few other jobs but none of them gave me any satisfaction. I was not good at them so my self worth went down even more.

My old friends drifted away as they moved on to other jobs. I found my self in a very bad spot. I was alone and felt pretty useless.

In the process of rebuilding myself, I discovered the new thought movement. I discovered it entirely by accident. Or so it seemed.

I began reading books about how to make money and I discovered that there was a common theme in all of them. The idea was that we each create the circumstances that surround us rather than being manipulated by them.

As I studied concepts that were foreign to me such as the law of attraction and the law of mind action, I began to see evidence of their truths. I remembered times when I worked at Westvaco when I had observed this very phenomenon. But not having any basis for causal relationship, I dismissed it like any good engineer would.

I had once made the statement that Westvaco should pay me to be in a good mood because when I was, the presses ran better and if I was in a really good mood, we would set production records. If I came to work in a bad mood, then we had nothing but trouble.

But even after reading the Tao of Psychology, I refused to acknowledge the relationship between my moods and the circumstances. There was no way my emotions could cause outside circumstances was there?

During the last few months at Westvaco, I met a faith healer. The stories he told and the things I observed caused me to believe that there really was more to the universe than what I had learned in school. But I still but my faith in science. But to the true science of mind, just the traditional observational science.

As I studied more and read books by Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, Charles Filmore and others I began to realize that there was something to this science of mind. I began to see that everything I observe is first created in my mind. I also began to understand what Wallace Waddles meant when he said that controlling the mind is the hardest and most import work any man can do.

I am still working on learning to control my thoughts. I often don’t feel that I have the freedom to create with my thoughts. My upbringing in a guilt based religion pops up often causing me to feel that I don’t have the right to even want certain things.

So as I begin my fiftieth year tomorrow, I am moving forward with excitement and wonder. I wonder what will happen next. I have moved way out of my comfort zone and most of my life lines are gone. I will be on my own to create the life that I desire. I can’t rely on anyone to do it for me. I am excited and scared at the same time.

I feel like I have wasted a lot of years getting to this point in life. I have always prided myself on being a fast learner, but in this most important area of life, I feel like I have been very slow on the uptake. Hopefully the pace will pick up and I will learn to release the old constrictions and begin to create a truly happy life that I want.

But first I have to feel like I deserve it.

Posted in family, Life Lessons, Metaphysics, Money | No Comments »

The Hero Complex

Wednesday, November 17th, 2010

The Hero Complex

One of Carl Jung’s archetypes is the hero. We all love the hero in our stories and movies. He is the one who despite all odds, swoops in to save the day. He puts aside his human vulnerabilities and makes every thing right in the end. Usually he does so with his own brute force or superior intellect.

The hero usually has no knowledge of the subtle forces of the universe working behind the scenes to create the situations he prevails against. He sees only the surface circumstances and his own power to save the day.

Without even realizing it, many of us long to be heroes. We love to help others who are less fortunate. We get great pleasure from pulling some one up or assisting them in some circumstance.

Often the pleasure is heightened when there is a common enemy involved. We often seek out someone or some organization to play the role of the villain so that we can be the hero and rescue some other soul from its evil clutches.

We often join in support groups where we commiserate with others about how we have been wronged by this person or that organization. When we cannot play the role of hero ourselves, we often seek out a hero. We look for someone to save us for the conditions that seem to be inflicted upon us.

What this hero complex misses is the realization that we each create our own reality. We create this though our thoughts both conscious and unconscious. Through what Jung refers to as synchronicity, events take place so that we see our beliefs played out in front of us in what we perceive as reality.

For example if we believe that money is scarce and that we have to work hard for money, we will see ourselves surrounded by poverty. We will create an evil villain out of the rich people around us believing that it is because of their oppression that so many are forced into poverty. We will totally ignore the opportunities that we have to create wealth for ourselves because we believe that the evil villain is repressing us.

Instead we will look for a hero to save us. We will seek a leader who will crush the evil rich people and spread the wealth among the poor and oppressed. Or we may try to be that hero and try to take down the rich. We will seek ways to destroy their wealth so that it will not be a constant reminder that we have not created the wealth that they have.

As a hero we take joy in watching one of the evil rich people come to ruin in either a personal scandal or bankruptcy. What we often fail to notice is that these situations are but temporary set backs to those who understand the workings of the universe. Even if they loose all their wealth, they will use the universal principles to create more wealth unless they too fall victim to he blame game and begin searching for or acting as a hero.

The hero loves to solve problems. He feels good when he overcomes some great obstacle to attain success. People who attain the same success with out the seeming struggle are often looked down upon by those who seek the hero archetype. Success that comes too easy is not looked upon as success. Even if the results are the same.

The belief that life was meant to be a struggle is furthered by fictional stories of all types. The most common form of story telling is that of a hero who saves the day. The more interesting the villain; the greater the hero. Often a large part of the story is spent creating and intensifying the evilness of the villain. Little may be know about he hero but he is considered a great man if he saves the day against the villain.

All we need to know about our hero is that he has some weakness that he has to overcome and that he overcomes the villain the end. We feel better about our hero if he uses his greater strength or cunning skills to overcome a villain than if the circumstances or luck play a large part in the salvation.

By having grown up listening to these stories, we often feel the need to seek out heroes or become them ourselves. We seek validation by becoming either a victim or a hero or possibly both.

Examples can come from every day life as well as form our great stories. Think about a lime when you lost your keys and had someone help you find them. Or remember a time when you had car trouble and suddenly a helpful person appeared as if from nowhere to help you get going again. In these cases we maybe we were the one who saved the day. Think about how good that made you feel.

Rather than seeking to create situations where things just work out and you always know where your keys are and your car is always safe and reliable, we tend to notice these extenuating circumstances more. By putting more emotional energy into these situations, we create more of them.

When we act upon the hero complex the feel good energy released from assisting someone in distress becomes like a drug. You feel useless and unworthy when you are not actively helping someone with a problem. In these cases, the larger part of you works behind the scenes using synchronicity to create more and more situations where you can act as a hero.

As your subconscious gets better and better at creating these situations you may begin to feel overwhelmed. But instead of taking at look at your belief system and working to create a different pattern, you may start looking for your own hero. You begin to act as a victim yourself and continue to create more and more of these situations that require a hero’s assistance.

The hero victim cycle becomes addictive and often there seems to be no solutions. Bigger and bigger problems are created that require larger and larger heroes.

The only solution to the hero complex is to stop look at the problems and start looking at the situations that are desired. This method is completely counter intuitive to both the hero and the victim. In fact it may be impossible for them to comprehend. It takes a huge paradigm shifty to even begin to think about such an environment.

Only through concentrated and conscious effort can the thought process be restructured to stop finding villains and start seeking opportunities. Scarcity thinking plays heavily into the minds of both hero and victim. Only by considering infinite resources can we break out of the hero victim cycle and begin to create the world and circumstances that we desire.

The hero complex is deeply ingrained into western culture and may be very difficult to break in our thought process. Recognizing the hero complex is the first step to ward creating the circumstances you desire rather than fighting against those that we do not desire.

I welcome your comments and would love to hear your examples of the hero complex in your life. Please enter your comments below.

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Posted in Environment, Health, Life Lessons, Metaphysics, Money | No Comments »

1998 Chevy Pick up won’t start

Wednesday, October 20th, 2010

1998 Chevy Pick up won’t start

My Dad called the other day to say that his Chevy Pick Up would not start. We began by checking the usual suspects, spark and fuel.

I used my inductive spark checker held to a plug wire and it indicated that we had spark. I put my hand over the exhaust pipe and it smelled like we had fuel. Hmm.

We tried the clear flood procedure even though it did not seem flooded. Still not start.

The next night I returned with my fuel pressure tester and timing light. We checked the fuel pressure and found 50 psi. We guessed that was enough even though the spec is 55 to 60.

We had noticed that the spark was intermittent on the tester which could have been form the way I was holding it or maybe from a bad cap or rotor. So dad bought a new cap and rotor to add to the new spark plug wires and air filter he had installed previously.

We tried to check the timing and could not find any marks on the damper. I hooked up our antique timing light anyway and found that it does a poor job of insulating the voltage from a modern high energy ignition system.

He called a mechanic friend of his who came over and hooked up the OBDII tester. The tester shoed no error codes and showed the timing to be correct. Glad to have our fears of a broken timing chain put aside. But it still would not start. His friend suggested that 50 psi was not enough fuel pressure to start the truck but I was doubtful.

I went back to help Dad move the truck to his shop so he could begin the process of removing the bed and swapping out the fuel pump. I checked to see if it might be a problem with the idle air control circuit but that seemed OK as well.

Once we had towed, tugged pushed and pulled the truck into place in the shop I decided to try one lat thing before I left. I poured some gas down the throttle body and sure enough it fired up. In fact it stayed running and ran just fine.

I went to hook up the fuel pressure tester again and the engine instantly died. I hooked it to the test port and again the engine would not start. We hit it with another splash of fuel and it started and again ran fine. Seems the low fuel pressure was not low enough to keep it form running but was low enough to keep it from starting when cool.

We tried it several more times and sometimes it would start without assistance but most times it would not. So Dad is now pulling the bed to swap the fuel pump.

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Posted in Car repair, family, Jeep, Life Lessons | 1 Comment »

11:11

Friday, October 1st, 2010

11:1111:11

I seem to be noticing a lot of number patterns lately. As I talked about in a previous post, I see 12:34 a lot.

Just the other day I was working on a friends truck and the clock resets every time truck is started. When I went to shut it off it read 12:34.

But I am also seeing 11:11 often now as well. I also see other variations. Like this morning I work up form a dream and looked the clock. It said 4:44.

Look at my score from car town in the photo above. It is 1111.1.

Steve Pavlina has written about 11:11 and there is a facebook group that talks about things related to 11:11.

I am sure that 11:11 means different things to different people, but to me it seems to indicate that i am on the right path. I try to notice what I am thinking about and how I am feeling when I notice 11:11 on the clock or on some other counter. Usually I notice it when I am feeling happy and free. It seems that if I am anxious or worried I will see it before it gets there like 11:07 or something. If I am feeling sad or overwhelmed, I often miss it and see 11:13 or so.

Proverbs 11:11 Through the blessing of the upright a city is exalted,
but by the mouth of the wicked it is destroyed.

This reminds me that words are very powerful. If we speak blessings, our “cities” will be built up. However if we speak words of doom and gloom, our “cities” will be destroyed.

What are your thoughts on 11:11 and 12:34? Please share them in the comments below.

Note that this was written on 10/01/10

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Posted in Life Lessons, Metaphysics | No Comments »

The Power of Passion by Alan Hobson and Jamie Clarke – Book review

Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

The Power of Passion by Alan Hobson and Jamie Clarke – Book review

I just finished reading The Power of Passion. This book is about the authors’ two attempts to climb Mount Everest.

I have never had much interest in mountain climbing myself. “Because it’s there” is as much a reason to avoid a place as it is to go there so Sir Hillary’s words don’t really inspire me much. For example, if there is a wasp nest or a copper head under a rock, “Because it’s there” is a very good reason to avoid the place.

A place that is freezing cold and does not have enough oxygen to support life is a place for me to avoid. However that does not at all diminish my admiration for those who have the passion for such adventure and have made the effort.

I was a bit disappointed by this book however due in part to its cover design. On the cover it describes the authors as “Everest Summiteers.” I was expecting a story about people who actually made it to the top of the mountain. A more accurate title would be “A History of a Campaign that Failed” although these writers in no other way compare to Mr. Twain.

The book describes two adventures to the mountain, the first where they lack experience and the second where they are under equipped. There is a note in the end of the book that tells us that the authors did eventually make it to the top, but this is not that story.

I had never even imagined what it is like to climb Mount Everest. I prefer to drive my Jeep to remote locations and maybe take a short hike to the look out. Just getting to the base of Mt Everest is an adventure as described it the book. Some of their “bad luck” might have been prevented by better planning but I can see how difficult it is to prepare for an adventure on the other side of the world in a remote setting like this.

I also found the title of the book to be misleading. I did not see much in the way of the power of passion being used to overcome any obstacles. I did see that the adventurers were determined to accomplish their goal, but I did not see any clear examples where passion was the obvious motivating factor. Stubbornness maybe, but not passion.

There is one scene in the story where a climber nearly dies and he is motivated to live through a satellite phone conversation with his young children. His passion for his family may be the underlying lesson but it is not really made clear in the story. The story seems to be more about people working together as a team to save a fellow climber even though they had decide before they left that they would not make such a sacrifice if faced with the choice.

I did learn one interesting fact about adventuring that made reading the book worthwhile. I learned how adventures such as these are financed. I had always imagined that the climbers were somehow independently wealthy playboys who had nothing else to do but go risk their lives on a mountain.

I had never grasped the concept of an adventure sponsor before. It turns out that the most difficult part of the journey for these guys was raising the money to go. The effort required to organize and finance the trip was so taxing on them that it sapped the energy they needed to actually make the climb. Having organized large events before, I can relate to the amount of effort that must be required to organize an expedition to Everest.

The dealing with sponsors must be incredibly nerve racking and mentally challenging. There is certainly some travel involved so it would be physically challenging as well. Also there would be the interruption on the physical training required for the trip.

I really enjoyed reading the stories of the challenges faced by the climbers and the stories of how they worked together to make sure every one got home alive even if they did not make their goal of reaching the summit. I can’t imagine the pain of coming that close to the goal and having to turn back. I am not sure I could have turned back. I might have been like so many other climbers and made my way to the top only to die on the descent.

I admire their courage and ability to make good decisions in the harshest conditions possible. They were exhausted, could not get enough oxygen and were freezing cold. The cold alone would do me in not even adding the other factors.

Overall, I enjoyed the book and I would like to read more about their campaign that actually succeeded. There is only a brief note at the end and a promise of another book that I have not yet found.

Posted in Life Lessons, Reviews, Travel | No Comments »

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