I feel sorry for our human imposed conceptions of heaven based on fantasizing from a book. Just think of the orthodoxy viewpoint of only humans in heaven. This means: No clothes in heaven. Does light have a soul? I guess no light. No chairs in heaven, so you can not sit down. Gravity? Seems attached to matter, does matter have a soul? Just floating in the black forever with no air or anything to conduct words. Um? Isn’t that like vanishing forever into a hole in the ground? Seems one need not believe in heaven then to achieve that?
Oh haven’t you heard? Faith is about believing. We do not comprehend Gods mystery.
Then keep the only human souls in some vacuum pile in an alienated heaven to yourself.
I am amazed but not surprised over the immaturity so evident in much “evangelical” notions. It is as if they were made up by a kid with too much time and imagination on their hands.
Hey. I’m going to form a club where all kinds of magical stuff happens but you are not to have questions, only believe in the story. Lets see how many we can fool into taking on an absurdity based upon future speculation, founded on nothing. Wait! Lets say it is from a book someone found that cannot be questioned. That way no one can say we are wrong, yet we can surly say that they are. Now you must only have faith and believe to think you are somehow granted the magical powers. See! Then you are saved, while non believer are tortured. Cool! Wait. That sounds just cruel.
Nah. Grownup won’t buy it.
I don’t need a book to do that.
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Follow my hands. Watch the watch; You know nothing. You are not authorized to think unless I tell you to. My words cannot be questioned, that way only yo are. If you make mistakes, you are blamed. If you do not convert just in the nick of time, you will be tortured forever. Follow my magic pendant. You are imperfect but held to perfects standards. If you are wrong you suffer forever, just because I say so. I’m very mean and vengeful. I hate my creation.
And no dogs in heaven.
Oh grow up!
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We do not “go to heaven”. You know heaven or you do not. You know the connectivity of Life, or you only guess. Heaven is where the heart is, or the heart is somewhere else.
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Get back to heaven. Don’t worry about the dogs. They’re already there; for Life (God) Loves Life. Heaven known? By Love. You and I do not require an interpreter or other intermediary to know Love.
I called it, this upcoming Health Care Initiative, The Death Care Bill, for today even Sarah Palin weighed in with her mighty sword. – Links Below
Provoking the public is a dangerous occupation, but one which corporate and right wing operatives seem most comfortable in fomenting. The best cover is one of righteousness, when a common understanding of verifiable facts in context are not what one is aiming for.
Much of the allegedly grass roots organizing of recent mob scenes at public health care bill information events, is being orchestrated by the very folks who were the Republican operatives that did the mob scenes at the 2000 election in Florida. They know the weight of the appearance of forceful “spontaneous” outrage. — At home we see ”average” people are outraged; point made. Worth a thousand words whether true or false.
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Media Bias?
Truth is the last thing those manipulating emotions are interested in, for dialogue can lead to understanding, and why would those staying rich off the broken heath care system want to change that? Follow the money; is the common wisdom most often ignored these days when visuals can be so exciting. But look at how upset they are!Regular people are upset!
Money is pouring in to fight the public good with fear and paranoia; the lifeblood of reaction. Naturally, the front groups call themselves public interest sounding names, and those on the conservative news circuit take the laced kool aid without question. How dare you question their question? Why we question you! The argument devolving into existential Russian Roulette.
This is lost on those being emotionally provoked by the conservative news and information sources shilling for these industries; that conservatism is always anti paradigm change. Psychological conditions of different groups in any population, can be ripe for nurturing crazy speak as impassioned comprehension of hidden truth This sort of thing helped precipitate genocide in World War Two, but is now invoked as a wise pill of fascist prevention. Amazing. The lack of continuity and coherence that emotion can shape ones intention into, and the targets the cognitive dissonance gets aimed at in answers name, requires no response to get to sleep at night an wake in the morning. It’s not my problem!
In that sense; many modern conservatives are against true, or real factual Democracy itself; for allowing just anyone into the cultural dialogue is inherently threatening to them. Conservative paradigms present the only validity is to be like me; what I stand for. Economic conservatives have been having great success at shaping religious conservatism into their own mindsets: Life is not fair, so why should conservatives be made to act as if it is or should be? Democracy, and its egalitarian premise of one vote for one person, must in some respect be defeated even while it is touted. Free speech defeated, even while it is invoked; freedom of choice defeated even while it is claimed sacrosanct. “Heaven is not a Democracy.”
That is both conservatism’s self satisfying loyal pride and their reality detachment strategy. Conservatism requires both a confidence in certainty and the surety that other ideas are inherently wrong. Facts need not be checked when I know I am already right. But I digress. Well. Not really.
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The Currency Of Ignorance
Truth, then, is no object to stand in the way of ideology. Facts outside of ideology become seemingly detached, and under the potential domain of generalized intellectual elites, already demonized, unless bought and paid for to promote conservative conceptions of reality. In which case they are hoisted upon flags, delivered as wisdom itself to a biased liberal intelligentsia. See! We have our facts too, only ours are better than yours cause they are true.
It is the conservatives detachment from verifying objective reality, that opens their Pandora’s Box of belief with its emotionally attached data stream. An information source need then only be assumed to be one of theirs to be truthful. This is the bane of conservatism and its many ideological manifestations in politics and religion; authority need not be accurate to fact, but assumed loyal to identity. Once truth is subjugated, all manner of ill can be conceived in the name of fighting evil. And so, in the name of goodness and right, followers come to do the bidding of their masters behind the curtains.
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The light of knowledge is a constant threat to conservative ideological mind control, and yet much conservatism motivates its followers in the name of that very light. But since all things are effectively One on so many levels, we all will pay the price of their own self deception. Those who profit off of manipulating human nature with fear, have us pay their price as well. As surely as if they were polluting the air or water we need to survive.
The only answer that can work for the conservative conundrum, is knowing the love of connection to all things. And yet this very release is most often denied or rendered supremely conditional by ideological prejudice. Human beings held in these traps are looking subconsciously for ways out, unfortunately, that way is usually presented as getting rid of all those other alien beliefs filling the world with their problems.
These, I admit, are my opinions and not Gospel truths. I am not provoking conflict, but suggesting means of understanding. I believe there are some open minded and hearted conservatives, but they seem to be perpetually drowned out by all the whining about liberalism going on in so much of the media. The money is not on their side.
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Why does liberalism so disturb the conservative mind frame? : Inherent flexibility and adjustments to the evidence of reality based upon rational reason. This means in some respects, what may be deemed the current most reasonable theory of interpretation of environments. These will likely seem, or be seen as an anathema to conservative beliefs. They do not believe they are following theory, but full Truth. That this is ultimately their opinion, is not acknowledged, but often denied.
As Bertrand Russell put it;
“The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.”
Aug 7, 2009 … Truth: This part of the bill was added by Republicans, … it would be one introduced by Senator Isakson (R) and his fellow Republican sponsors. … However, it is important to note that a Living Will is made by the …
America lost one of its great journalist today. They do not make them like him anymore.
They only made one.
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I hope that looking into his life might inspire other journalist to get back to open-minded news. So often today, we get news delivering shows, where facts in context are passe. It would seem our news outlets believe we require entertainment/infotainment “news”, constructed of hyperbole and shock the numb excitement value. The emerging face of corporatist culture; managed news, managed democracy, and a managed populace.
By Peter Freed, USA TODAY By Gary Strauss and Peter Johnson, USA TODAY From Baby Boomers to the Greatest Generation, journalist Walter Cronkite will be …
WELCOME TO AN UNPRECEDENTED MASS EXTINCTION EVENT.
If you are like many of us, this mass extinction event is kinda like aging. When you are young, if anything, you are in a hurry to grow up. You seem to be going to live forever, but you are practical and might plan out a lifetime. You want to achieve this or that, career and family, travel the world, write the great novel inherent somehow to what you feel about life. You have time. Most days, the mirror looks back at you the same.
Then suddenly systems get compromised, perhaps your eyes need correction, your joints begin to ache much of the time, you might have some chronic condition that takes more and more of your now precious time. On the planetary scale; welcome to the shutdown. Now you might wonder; what were you thinking? You might speculate what took your mind off of this great blue, white and brown ball. Whatever happened to foresight?
Here we are now, plunging a relatively perpetual motion self replicating system into a possibly mortal phase. One half of the mass of the worlds land vertebrates has vanished, while humankind has quadrupled. Forest are vanishing at a phenomenal rate, so others can live like we do, as the adds suggest, and so you and I can have the kind of furniture the designer zeitgeist (these are Brazilian Cherry wood floors! Wow!) implies you are a self realized and accomplished individual. Our fantasies and expectations have become a noose around the earth itself, yet we are told to deny it, to get back to work, to own more so you are more invested in the machinery grinding the planet to a premature death. Are you going to be a contrarian?
This money making machinery of doom in the USA, is vested in the self destructive notions that conservatism, and a perpetually immature ego will provide. We are told God is in control, so there is nothing particular to do, or be oddly pure and wait for Armageddon. We are told Luddite leftist scientist are irrationally alarmist, how wrong they have been so they are wrong still, the jury is out. Well, the jury might be out, but Rome is burning. And the worlds isolationist/nationalist/conservative self preservation complexes, are trying to keep a subjective view of the world, where only our kind matter more. This penchant to favor division, will conquer us–for ever.
When the jury gets back, it will likely be too late to reverse the suicide pack now in progress. We will have let the voracious appetites of opportunism consume the ground from under our feet, and the support of most living systems on earth. The perverted assumptions that we must always be having more or we are losing must be reversed. The implied insecurity issues must be addressed.
The question is; who is awake and on the side of understanding global systems and the interrelationship dynamics of all things on earth? These are the ones who are both able and willing to demonstrate reason and evidence for the way to saving our home world from its prime under-examined and so out of control living agent of destruction; our fears, hopes and desires.
I took part in a domestic violence group meeting yesterday, where we try to help someone put into the court system over family violence issues.
Well, we all ended up crying on that day over the lost parts of our lives. In this case siblings who died young, yet had a special impact on our lives. Generalizing; most of us have not adequately mourned our losses, nor fully honored what we have been given. There are always lessons given by Life.
For the violence applicant, he had his brother die on the same week he lost his job and had his car repossessed. This had him react by falling into a three week depression. He stayed in bed sleeping most all the time. His kids and wife would come up to him wondering both what was going on and when he would be over it with the family finances in ruin. He also has past serious drug use and mental issues connected to that.
The person in charge of that meeting mentioned how her life had been in tatters and how she had learned to never think things cannot get worse than they seem to be. Since her experience is; it will get worse just when one feels put upon all one can be.
(We later talked a bit about mothering and nurturing with Mothers Day being the next day and two mothers at the meeting. I talked of not remembering my mother when I was 13; who she was, what she was like. But I did remember when I was 8 or so how mad she had become when we 4 kids did nothing for her on Mothers Day. How painful it was to feel you have somehow hurt your own mother so deeply without knowing it.)
I told my story of living in my truck, parents dead since I was a kid, fathers suicide, dead sisters masochism, I living with toothaches and missing teeth during puberty, no one ever seeming to care at all about me so much of my life, etc.
Then 25 years ago there was a day of epiphany when living in my truck in a town with nearly 50% unemployment, abandoned homes and businesses. I was broke, no job or home, soon to be no gas. One night I looked outward with all this resentment and feeling of abandonment. I looked up into the night sky and surrendered.
I declared all my ambitions for love and belonging were over. I was clean to whatever Life would have me do. I was now Its servant. Need to say; my life changed dramatically from that point on.
No longer a unwavering victim of circumstances, the world seemed new to me. Next thing I knew I was working for a “New Age” kind of church which nearly matched my philosophy/cosmology. Became a farm manager and speaker for the group at times. Had women competing over me!
I am a much more restored person now. I am not perfect in the sense of having no problems. But since that surrendering moment, I have had much more of a life than I thought I ever would.
The most important thing I know is to come to know what Unconditional Universal Love is. How It is beyond our abilities to fully grasp and yet how it is up to my actions to live nearer to It each day.
A life of loss and longing can be transformed into one of service to a value that is Greater, yet a part of us all. No matter how bad things get for me, I know, I need just stand up to see over the mountain top.
{This post resulted from yesterdays meeting and a response I made on a WordPress blog today which is linked to on my blogroll}
After attending another interfaith meeting on the Muslim Challenge to what is common to it and Christian faith, I remain boggled at both religion and human influence pedaling on the “True one God” or “One True God” or “God and no other god”.
I was raised to accept the Catholic bureaucracy as a kind of automatic pilot God machine. It was such a machine that it nearly never had to mention or talk about the Bible much at all. Imagery, ritual, and most importantly, programing as the one true church, was all it needed. Don’t go to church and you will likely go to hell, unless right at the end you happened to have Extreme Unction?
As I understood it, the Extreme Unction thing, if given in time, could forgive your sinful self and still get you into heaven. Once again, better stay connected to the church or else you risk a forever in hell. A place of apparently eternal torture of some questionable kind.
Mystify and Dominate
My opinion on religion has evolved into this over time from researching its historical roots, my own experience and observations; most religions seem to start out with one figures extraordinary experience or apparent message from something greater than we. Many of these messages go on to become institutionalized and reassembled by followers.
Many of the rituals have precedence in previous pagan or pantheistic concepts reworked to a newly defined unified theory–one true God. But now it becomes about institutional self preservation as the prime directive. Mystical secret or expert only knowing, gets solidified by circular reasoning’s no questions to the controlling core or else, finality’s. We end up with the know for certain club of entrenched “true” believers behind a spiritual-cultural paradigm and in some cases legions of followers.
Those two originating factors may be gone by now (first spirituality’s and a vision of Divine union). The now Sacred Prophets experience is usually felt by followers to be a magnetic one, one of profound revelation of a Love that extends to all things. Religions then go on to define their particular “brand” as the true one. The originating motivations are now mere symbols of remade traditions that have an operational life and cause of their own; continuing to attract and contain followers, or else.
I have had such a transformational transcendent experience (spiritual epiphany) when I was an agnostic at 27 years old. It carried no religious imagery of any known system of belief to act as a colored lens of interpretation. I was just cast into the presence of an absolute Love for a brief moment one night when walking down a city street. It effected my perceptions for days, as if the Divine rent open the night sky and handed me a gift. I have never had that all pervasive experience since, but it did change my then only scientific view of what reality is made of.
My generic experience
It seems to leave one who has it with a mission statement, but one hard to swallow; I was wrong about so much of my life and how I see and judge things. Most of the world I am aware of, as an individual perceives it by news and ones own living of it, suggest most others are in that same boat. We bale and bale the water out our whole lives, waiting on something profound to become sure. We try to arrange our lives to have some love and meaning in it.
If we are fortunate, we might have a passionate place in society, where we are valued by family and we value others. We can also be alienated, with profound feelings of separation from others. This sense of separateness might leave us feeling unloved, possibly even in a universe which seems to not care a thing about us. We may be attracted to religious or scientific notions of what life and its limits are.
How could someone as alienated as I actually was, live up to a vision that impressed me with the sense that everything is only actually born of Love? I had never acted or behaved as such. Who was I to turn into? A preacher?–Hey! I had this experience! No! Wait a minute. Stop! Listen! I really did! Hey stop!
I could not tell others how to have a transcendent experience. My life showed little evidence that I practiced what I preached. My behavioral patterns were quite entrenched. It seemed I’d have to fix me first before my mission could proceed. Long story short; day after day my “enlightenment” receded into the background, remaining as a kind of personal talisman to spiritual experience that serves me to this day.
Years latter I had a different kind of spiritual realization. The first and only time I tried it. I had heard at a health class, the instructor telling someone, (who asked after class if he believed it was possible), how to “do” astro-projection–leaving ones body. The next day I tried it. That really shook me up, but it left me with, not a sense of Love, but one of life and awareness beyond the body. A shocking view of consciousness beyond the dust and water we are made of, again tested my notions of the bounds of empirical experience.
Like the prior profound experience, I was left with no fear of death. Many of us who are in deep ways afraid to fully live, are haunted by a fear of death. I have come to assume that is our own life in a kind of stasis waiting to be brought fully to life, as if there is a mission and our boat is not up to making that journey, so we wait in a kind of fear zone, worried over our rising water. Some religions and other beliefs say this has to be because we are always sinners, so must do everything they say to save ourselves.
BACK TO THE GOD AND RELIGION THING
This brings me back to many religions who hold that fear zone card over the head like a guillotine, saying; follow us or else. It is a powerful card to hold, promise Divine Love or at least respect and eternal life on the one hand, and a card of damnation in the other. This see-saw works between ideal or belief and the realities of experience. I (we) am usually not omniscient enough to be perfect always to my ideals and beliefs. Then if will follow that I have baggage of fallen rock in my spiritual boat that always threatens to sink me, hence the recipes of how to cast the rocks out; by rejection, types of denial, persecution of self or others, and pandering to a Divine One to forgive my Divinely created fallibility’s.
(Then there is authentic contrition, not based on damnation but on loves return releasing guilt. This is available to everyone no matter faith or not, so I will not attach it to any particular belief system, though it may be claimed by them as their special awareness or compensation.)
BUT WE HAVE TO TRUST IN SOMEONE OR SOMETHING.
It all might be of the best intentions. This can become a pseudo-spiritual headlock. Gridlock of the soul enmeshed in a surrender to apparent authorities who presumably have or are privy to more truth. We become the forsaken, since we are not allowed to truly examine spiritual tenets, presumptions and authorities. We become addicted to the cause, be it of truth, fantasy, illusion or some fusion between.
Many religious institutions were once cults of a possibly enlightened individual. They regress to hierarchical structures, ridged rules and behavioral regulations, and with the perversions of might making rights obvious or subconscious fear cards (damnation and hell). Usually various forms of male dominance over women’s apparent practical connections to the creative powers of life. These religions now come to present a kind of threat to our continuing physical existence on earth. Did not whomever’s one true God know what mischief followers would get into over the one true turf battles? Is this one true God really obsessed with judging our fallibility’s and whether we acknowledge God’s existence, or say God’s name in the “right” language?
The usual answer to questions is a circular reasoning short circuit; that– one cannot question God or “His” ways. Brain unplugged, mission accomplished!
WHO IS RESPONSIBLE?
We are told we have free will so we are all responsible, yet much of government, religion and culture is often about shunting off communally unacceptable free will adventures, usually because in the operational consensus reality, harm or dysfunction result from those ideas that pop into our heads, and so need to be controlled.
Fair enough, I say. But if we are prevented from examining our taboos and laws for their continuing relevance, we are machine robots and not conscious and responsible beings. If I act the way I do because of treats or threats of punishment, I am not actually being responsible. I am essentially being forced or tortured (in future) into so doing. A Pavlovian experiment gone big time. There is little merit in mindless control, yet orthodoxies, in particular, seek out mindless (unquestionable) behavioral control as a solution to reoccurring apparent dysfunction. They literally become insulated from examining if truth itself, a living truth, is being prevented from being known, because of might makes right institutionalized circular reasoning mind control.
CONTRADICTIONS AND CREATION
There are religions out there that believe you can buy your ancestors into heaven. Imagine the controlled perceptual notions that equate money with salvation after you are already gone! But how convenient a fund raising gimmick!
Many seemingly have you in the position that if you are not perfectly conforming to books and dogmas, because of your mistake or stupidity, you will be eternally tortured by a God the Sadist-Supreme Terrorist. I wonder who could have actually inserted those notions into society for rote control? Any ideas?
While some are urged to be in constant fear over their own God given bodies and abilities, other are issued guarantees of favor now or in the afterlife, if only they do what whomever is saying to them. Many TV religious pop shows promise health and healing, pandering to the ill and a fear of death, most always followed by a God needs us to buy another satellite to pass the word. Interesting how God was kinda strapped in until writing and now rockets came to be. Now the holy word of someones liking can be spread far and wide. Of course you must send in your part of the retirement check to join in Gods mission through whomever. God, it seems, is quite dependent upon fund raising.
FAITH IN FICTION
Most of what I have presented can be described as nothing more or less than monkey business. It has all the attributes of domination and mystification–Darwinian power tricks and truths. It attempts to shut down critical (God given) critical thinking abilities. It seems to promote a highly conditional love and acceptance to behavior. It in effect, marginalizes God to human control features, requiring obedience, begging, not facing the source of ones own actual motivations, thus empowering evil as a reactionary power. It makes God out to be a dysfunctional ego addict, needing endless pandering from more unable creatures to what? Feel good about Itself? Know it has created robots who learn to suppress their own God given inquisitive and exploration abilities for a frozen in place ethos?
The interfaith meeting I started this post with is about the Muslim challenge to Christians to meet the two basic laws of Love; Love of God and Love of neighbor. In essence I am for this. However I believe much of these faiths are in the very position I was; where is the operational evidence in my own life of these beliefs?
I was privy to have experienced the union of Love across all things and apparent problems of being. I believe everyone can have this presentation given to them if it is so required. How much more noble, how much more of merit if we were to not require being dragged into the transcendent, but came to recognize it as the organizing principle of Being. Who is able to activate their own minds and hearts to get past programing and touch the fullness of Being, without being scared to dare know for oneself? This is always the problem of deprogramming from cults, just to get you own will back.
Love flows in, through and around us continually. It is I who chose to look otherwise by appearances. No matter what you or I have done or not done, It is there unconditionally, with Arms open.
This I have known, and at my most conscious, can see as obvious and true.
Being involved with family violence control puts me in an odd situation.
I have avoided physical fighting my whole life. Childhood became the most significant influence on this. My father had told me, and I took it as holy law, that you as a guy, do not strike women. I cannot say that my older sisters and I did not have shoving matches, but for me that would have been self defense. Our family dynamics was heavy on the mental sparing which can seem actually more devastating.
The physical violence in our house was later done, after my mothers death, by a step mother-guardian. She would not hesitate to hit, throw objects and threaten with knives. She sent my father to the hospital with a big gash across his forehead. I slept with the largest kitchen knife under my pillow as a self defense plan for a knife attack while I was asleep. She had hit me in the face while I was asleep, then locked me out in the snow in my pajamas. My father committed suicide not long after that.
Earlier I had incidences when someone seemed to be threatening my life as a freshman high school. I was literally about 100 lbs. and someone morbidly obese around 500 lbs, held me under water to near drowning during pool time in a crowded pool. He had done this more than once. It became so serious to me (swallowing-inhaling watter) that I thought I would have to take matters into my own hands. One more time, and I was going to put him in a headlock with my legs around his neck and hold him under until it meant something. I was a totally inhibited kid and did not trust authority to do anything but blame the victim. So I had to weigh in my mind, possibly causing someones death and being called and treated as a murderer.
As it turned out, he never did that again. But I was sure it would have been me to blame and I would have felt I had no options in my own self defense. No one seemed to notice him doing this during the pool commotion, so I believed no one would accept my story. It just never came through to experience. In physical confrontations during boyhood, I found I had to keep the potential for rage out of me, especially since I had no doubt that I would take down someone twice my size. It took someone quite a bit larger and older to overcome me. I was afraid of my rage and how if unleashed it would seem out of my control.
(As evidence that I am not just delusional about this strength proclamation. When it rained a lot during physical education, outdoor activities were called off and we were put into the gym, we freshmen and the sophomores, to have a thing called “bombardment”. This is where there are two sides chosen, a line across the middle of the gym, where the two sides throw rubber balls a little smaller than a soccer ball at each other. Out of about 150 students divided in two, little me was one of the last picked, last or second to last.
Well the first game I discovered that being in the lower 10% in size had me a bit afraid, so I hung back as many did. All it took was the guy next to you ducking and a ball out of nowhere taking you out, while leaving a big red mark somewhere. I decided to risk all and take it to the line next game.
You could see most of what was being thrown up front. I found out I could catch any-ones ball thrown at me, but no-one could hold onto mine. I was also very accurate. I won that game. The last guy standing. I was picked second of all players next game. The team first picking, picked his seeming best friend first, so I was first on the other team picked. The next game was the last. It oddly ended up being me the last standing on my team, and a very out of shape guy hiding and dodging in the corner on the other side when the period ran out. I could no longer throw fast enough to eliminate time for him to move. That is how little old me was as a skinny five feet two.)
TRUTH VS ADVICE
What I just said I cannot say to someone involved in family violence. As far as physical violence goes, I do not hit women. I have told ones who gave me any actual physical provocation that, “If you do that again, we are over!” I do not tolerate fighting, especially in the home relationships. I try to avoid physical confrontations with anyone. Now that I am a “senior citizen” I find you are not seen as a threat overall, or there is a kind of automatic respect. Most of that sense of being on guard is much diminished now. I take peace as my way and it path is most often open.
I have found that emotional abuse has prove a bit more difficult to not take part in, compared to a sense of law that one just never does such a thing. I grew up that way, making fun of someones mistake or being ridiculed. It is then a model of behavior I have had to contain and reverse. To do that requires a will and an understanding of the Golden Rule or Categorical Imperative. I need to establish the sense that not only does “what goes around comes around.”, but it is already damaging my life. Abusing others in any way is profoundly self abuse.
I need to see (learn to recognize) when I am treating another like I would not wish to be treated, and immediately review what my self respect or control problem really is. We are often given the information from another that we are on some kind of attack and they becoming defensive, or initiating their own retaliations.
Still, when expressing guidance to someone, it will often fall flat if it is preached or describes as something I am so above, and can’t understand how someone could do such a thing. That fits as a key with very few dysfunctional programs. I have to speak out of and through my own life, the love in your heart has to be in it, to be a gift expected to have a chance at being received.
PROGRESSIVE OR REACTIONARY
In some ways I have described political tactics and ways of manipulation. All manipulation is in some way an abuse of the truth. Its vibrational disturbance will not go unnoticed, except perhaps, by like minded dysfunction. The same situations and rationalizations that come to effect home life are used in the greater life of our world. Even if everyone does it, doesn’t make it right.
We will find manipulative arguments covered if various guises meant to hide their intention, and instead, be represented as your own interest. Fear and insecurity are great hiding places for manipulative interest. Optimistic vision can also be used as a trick to catch someones interest, then later prove to have been a ruse. We need to be both critically minded on the one hand, and have our heart held out open in the other. True adults can do this.
The upcoming election seems to be being based on fear and insecurity vs. hope and optimism, both of these being held as paramount in differing ways by the candidates. I am not saying that we are not justified in having these inclinations. What I am encouraging is the “true believers” and the doubtful to have their wits about them. As citizens and voters, it is up to us to determine the fact from fiction, the hidden agendas from the promises of safety and security. For power will seek to inject its corruptions into all areas of life if let be.
We each are freedom, love, and truths best and last hopes. Better to stand with understanding under their tall light, than the ignorance that festers in the shadows of misunderstanding.
Since I cannot get out of now, my past has relative meaning, my future is entirely speculative, no matter how much I plan, I am stuck in this middle. So what happens to you?
So we speculate upon life, and to death, upon a relative end to now. Yet it is not now that ends, it is a relative relationship of experience and abilities referred to as memory and self expression that is either left to quickly disintegrate with bodily processes, or else remain present in now in some other dimension(S) and or processes. The latter leading to much speculation regarded as guaranteed, one way or the other.
Now is so certain, we gamble on the future with certain abandon. Patterns of interaction become the crumbs we follow as we explore our lives. These become attempts to influence the future by intervening with intention in the vibrational fields of the now. All matter and energy exist in vibrational patterns, so this is not news.
TO CHOSE OR NOT TO CHOSE
But what we each chose to do or not, is news. Our influence on now sets up permanent alterations to the future. We are both individually powerful, yet collectively completely codependent, as a drop of water in the ocean. We are also equally dependent on the laws of the Universe, whether spelled out in religion or science or still unknown, it makes little difference.
That we all originated in an infinitesimally small mathematical point singularity, is considered, a ridiculous theory, or if accurate, means all things have a common identity and origin to the Original Now. Not too unlike a God manifesting all things. Whatever the absolute truth be, by its nature, it is only questionable by relative ignorance. Unfortunately, human abilities of comprehension and understanding guarantee relative ignorance, practically no matter what.
So what?
We are then, all in this now together, all changing the future in some ways forever. Ones presence in the now, then, never truly leaves and was implied from the beginning.
FATE OR FREE WILL
Chaos, entropy, uncertainty, randomness; they are the kindest gifts of all. They give us a chance to have meaning in our lives, to change the universe by our being a focused function of its ways unique to our time and place. If we presume we are not all in this together, we are lost, in some respects blinded. We will then emit that vibration into what we do have remaining (subconsciously and physically) of the all that we are made of. This will likely bring to us a certain chronic negative experience, being that it is vibrationally dissonant.
The negative, or sense of negation in the self, can be a great point of impulse for enlightenment towards healing if for some reson one is cast into the light of enlightenment-understanding. Or if instead our error is defended with walls put in place to guard it, it becomes magnified in some ways by “living” in whatever the error is. We are somewhat able to read the levels of dissonance or disconnection in one another. However, if we are entrenched in our own disconnect, those disconnected like us may seem “our kind of people”.
FACING CREATION HEAD ON
Now will let us explore our past to adjust vibrations as known in feelings and emotions. When done, this is a great aid in understanding present consciousness in the living moment of now. Not trying to explore and understand, or pretending the past never happened, is to throw away the book of knowing lessons we each were given.
Not understanding our errors and growing out of them, we are left to perpetuate them into the present, their vibrations moving out into both the physical world and the metaphysical. We can set up our own vibrational trap around ourselves, leaving us with a personal lens that sees the world of relationships inside the same error. This can leave me in some ways dead to the now, the present experience of life and being, in effect, withheld.
Here, right now, is about that quest to know in some clear way, the medium in which we are always intimately related to the truth of being. Known or not to our minds and emotional adjustments.
Have a good one. Your future is both up to you and completely tied to Creation. The apparent paradox is in the perspective.
(photos at bottom of post to depict (as best I could create) cloud color like that often associated with funnel forming conditions)
This is about the Oak Lawn tornado that happened during a spring outbreak in April of 1967.
It has been referred to me, by the person I predicted it to about an hour before it happened, at the last class of the day, as; “(Benafia). You and your tornado!” When school resumed many days (3weeks?) later, that room was the last remaining open on that floor of the high school. Plywood boarded off the rest to the southwest. Nearly two dozen people died in my town. (Now I have learned it was 33 deaths. I found a site on recollections of that days events. I also have discovered conflicting information, so what the parameters, like time or town borders may be I do not know.)
Anyone who has been in this kind of natural disaster, might recall how reality seemed turned on its head. That day National Guard rifles were pointed at we kids as we walked down the middle of the street. They asked us what we were doing in an angry tone, rifles pointed at us. (We were where you were told to walk; not near stores, down the center of the highway. We had been out checking on some of our relatives and friends.)
Sirens went on and on. There is no power and so no news but rumors. Electric clocks everywhere were stopped at that fateful moment for some time to come, in some cases months or more. When I got home from the terrifying “normal” trip to the store to get pop for my terminally ill step brother who was working (one of the longest living survivor of a blood cancer at that time), favorite trees were gone. We got that pop to him at the job another block north. (I worked there on weekends, Friday evening, Saturday and 2am Sunday morning to sometimes afternoon ($1.00 an hour). Anyway, in the parking lot at his (our) work there was a two by four going right through someones windshield. Debris was everywhere.
A HALF HOUR BEFORE
Earlier, we had left home for the four block walk to the store after waiting out an exceedingly wicked but brief electrical storm. It passed and it cleared up a bit. Leaving to the store, there was an ominous sense of pushing ones chances with the unknown. I had completely forgotten my prediction it seems to me.
While just into the grocery store and up the first aisle a bit, a man ran in saying there’s a funnel cloud outside. He was quite excited about it. I thought I have to see if this is true. I was an avid weather watcher, so I went out on 95 street to look and could not fathom the odd sloped wall dragging down from the sky to the west. It seemed a mix of brown pushing into that eerily gray to yellowish brown green that I have come to see in the cloud atmosphere around future funnels. Since it was just three quarters to a mile from us at the time, I could not see the other side of the funnel. My memory is of an inexplicable fuzzy sloped wavering wall dragging into an oddly greenish sky. That time of my viewing would place it very near the touchdown point at Southwest Highway and 95th St.
With the wind staring to howl, two younger step brothers and my younger sister went back into the store with me. We went to the back of the store to be away from the huge wall of windows on the stores north side. I thought; man, is this ever the worst palace to be, a grocery store full of potential projectiles. That jet and train engine combo roar built up and seemed to shake the air. It went pitch black. I reached out and touched someone. I said; “George. Is that you?” He said” Yeah. It’s getting hard to breathe.”
OH! THIS IS DIFFERENT.
I had never heard of this vacuum experience phenomenon before. I prepared for the onslaught of glass and cans as the roof came down. Suddenly, dying seemed close at hand. I was trying to get us away from shelves that could fall on us when time just ran out. Time disappeared with the light and the waiting, seconds or a few minutes, I can’t quite recall. Then light came back through the store windows, the sound rapidly diminishing. Rushing outside, the clouds were whirling in the opposite direction as I last looked. Pieces of fence, roof shingles and all kinds of tree debris and metal objects were on the road. We paid for the pop left at the counter and went back on our mission. I did not then know the tornado went by about 500 feet from us.
Later, out exploring after running home, then going out looking for where the emergency vehicles were really heading, when we got to near the high school, total devastation started. The cement gymnasiums pool roof had gone into the pool. We walked on cement beams, some that dove into the water, looking and listening, since someone said they heard a voice in the water. A man came up and asked us what we were doing there. We told him of the voice someone heard, and it seems memory has it that he said; ‘It has been checked out. It is too dangerous for us to be there.’ Across the diagonal highway, a young girl (9yrs old?) in a trench coat was picking up surviving whiskey bottles from a liquor store, and hiding them in her long coat.
I asked my older sister at home what they did during the storm. I wanted to make sure they went into the basement. We always had this plan to go to the southwest corner of the basement, which was two thirds underground, into the old coal room. She said they heard the noise and were looking out the window. They could see garbage cans and all kinds of stuff flying sideways down the street, so they ran into the basement.
WHEN WHAT WAS VANISHES
You could see through town as if a mysterious trail has been blazed, where buildings and homes once were. We heard horror stories from just moments before; someone allegedly impaled out in the athletic field. A bus was upside-down on top of a three story house left standing, I seem to remember. That looked even more unbelievable than the generalized devastation. The bus stations collapse killed some (?). And now another storm was starting to form, so we had to head home 5 blocks away north. I touched a leaning telephone pole and saw four or five others down the line start to move. I could not believe they were so close to seemingly falling. Our house missed annihilation by about one block.
Many times that year, the tornado warning sirens would go off. Once I ran out of where I was working to see it pitch black out west. I began to suspect that when clouds are that black, something has drawn soil into the air. We were all on edge that summer as much severe weather occurred. Another time at around six on Sunday morning at work, someone said there is a strange cloud coming down. I went out to look and it was a finger like projection of a wall cloud. I could see it act like some kind of conveyor belt, just blocks away and getting nearer, almost touching the ground, yet not a tornado. The clouds top was going one way, its bottom the other, as its thunderstorm approached from the northwest. It might actually be called a “roll cloud”. I will have to check up on it. I got back in since I did not want to find out what a strange thing was up to.
Another aspect of the 1,000 people injured that day carried grim news into the future. A stepbrothers swimming team friend was in the emergency room, his face wrapped and I believe several broken bones, not knowing if he would see again. His dad had picked him up from practice. My stepbrother, when visiting him a day(?) later, was not to tell him his father died being sucked out of the car window at the intersection. That is how I remember hearing it. My second youngest stepbrother had his confirmation cancelled at St Gerald’s for that night, understandably.
INVISIBLE ME
There was a famous (have seen it on TV in historic tornado footage) shot of my former grammar school damage where the tornado lifted enough to stop destroying homes, (except mobile homes a mile further up, at least 1 death there.). If you ever happen to see it, 16 year old me was standing right behind that photographer at that moment. I believe there are a few nuns and a priest in it, not sure. That is the one I am trying to get on this post. It is strange in that way, it is what my own eyes remember exactly. The adjoining church had some windows blown out, so for some time different colored replacement glass was a reminder of a kind of survival and remembrance of that day.
You could smell the wet or rotting plaster and wallpaper then when the “famous” photo was taken. Those old school walls had an odd smell to them. I took six roles of film on some cheap little spy camera from Japan I ordered from a magazine, that I had never tried before. Never developed the hundred or so photos, as the little roles of film vanished in time.
I remember the house directly across from the school had been battered but not erased like all those to the high school. One tree at the southwest corner on St Gerald’s School lot had something like a 1″ by 6″ board going right through the middle of a branch 20 feet up (?). I took never to be seen photos of ground down trees, brick homes half eaten away at the edge of the tornadoes trail. Many dramatic angles from the beginning to the end of the tornadoes track. In most intense tornadoes of F-3 and up, you will see these same scenes; trees holding someone’s couch, buses and cars crinkled and put into piles and stuck into homes as if they were origami paper vehicles, and the insides of homes scattered and mixed with everyone elses. Devastation takes on a certain shocking similarity.
GETTING HOME
The tornado killed the huge elm trees that were the landmark in our front yard, where as I child I would sit between their large root–to trunk legs. Sometimes many of us sat in our own trunk niche. Our trustworthy large apple tree split in half. We had to climb through it to get to the house.
The east west highway in front of the house was blocked for a while, as chainsaws growled away on the widest Elm that split in half. You could see those Elm trees from up to ten (?) miles away, when up on the other side of the moraine deposit, on the other side of old glacial Lake Chicago. They were a plume of green rising above a sea of green. An underground stream (my father said, and our lower yard drop and uplift at the neighbors across a grass lot indicated) happened to flow beneath them, they always had all the water they wanted. My father had said to us as kids that those trees were invincible, lasting all these years being often hit by lightning and ferocious storms. One myth ended, very near his own vincible (month later suicide) end.
As it turns out that tornadic day, another high school in session about an hour or more before was hit. That town had even more casualties, I believe, leaving that tornado I was in, kinda off the Weather Channels radar when I watched a special on it of that days outbreak. (I have now learned that is wrong about that town having more casualties, but that high school had several deaths, giving it a more concentrated impact to a tragic similar narrative for those families.)
Ours was a wedge tornado in the photo (I remember the photo being called something like; A portrait of a killer.) and the one side I could see, must have been F3+, (just learned F-4) the radar image shown in coming papers (as I recall), had it seeming to have its own spiral band of storms feeding into it, (the prior intense lightning storm?) leading me to believe it was so well organized and long lasting a super-cell, that it may have been the same storm that hit the other school. Just guessing.
“YOU AND YOUR TORNADO!”
A very shy guy (me) blurting out; “There’s going to be a tornado!” to the kid next to him, I believe, picked up on the subconscious currents that some of us know, moves between those of us open to receive them at unpredictable times. That is the one and only time I told anyone there is going to be a tornado.
Someone on the History Channel special on this tornado, ridiculed the notion that a massive body of water could influence a storm because tornadoes are “warm air storms” exactly why that cool air that chills downtown Chicago in summer is not near as warm! One would need to explain why upper F scale tornadoes do effect small towns around Chicago, even repeatedly, while big old Chicago, at worst, gets dwindling funnels. I would not say under very special conditions, a serous tornado could not hit Chicago, but it defies odds to explain why it has not, as not being the one really big influence at the city’s shore. Ridicule does not alter statistics.
It is quite common to have a “watter spout” hazard issued on the Great Lakes, at least while I was there, and no Tornado Watch issued. Yes, a tornado over watter will become a watter spout of sorts, but there is a difference in the general phenomenon. A paradoxical but not contradictory phenomenon occurs with the average water spout. Usually the relatively smooth but humid lake atmosphere can allow rope-vortices’s to descend to the surface, because of the stability. These normally dissipate near the more harsh surface on land.
Many a watter spout would not be considered in the F-3 and plus range (except a tornado hitting a small lake). The Oak Lawn tornado making such a “good” watter spout speaks to this stability factor allowing the funnel to reestablish its thorough surface connection in appearance. This was an intensely rotating super cell just minutes before, so that rotation was allowed to regain a solid appearance, but I doubt seriously it held the same updraft intensity as the land based F-4. This is my opinion. This storm was called the Oak lawn tornado because that is where the strongest point of that storms tornado development was, after that something ate away at it. My guess is Lake Michigan was a primary factor. Traveling at 65 mph, it would seem unlikely that such a mammoth well developed storm had strangled itself with its own cold air downdraft’s wrapping into it. Yes, I am speculating.
The History Channel special did not claim this person was anything but a survivor. I would imagine that for safety sake, meteorologist might not agree with me since it might have people near any lake or branch of a Great Lake, think they are immune. I was shocked to hear some people who had a tornado think they we immune because they lived in a valley! Variables make a difference, depleting a tornadoes fuel by wrapping in cooler air is how many tornadoes diminish, as dry air wrapping into hurricanes weakens them overall.
Lake Michigan. That is what I believe was the savior that day. The tornado could possibly have gone many more miles through solid cityscape. Once cool and more stable air got entrained or sucked in off the waters large cooling effect mass, it probably pulled most of the energy on that hyper intense uplift of hot humid air. You had an F-4 drop down and get pulled right back up in less than a mile, while allegedly traveling at 65 miles an hour, progressively dimming of the F scale rapidly, while heading right for the Great Lake. Possibly why Chicago’s downtown is virtually safe from an intense tornado, but I would never say, given the right wind speeds angle and storm formation development, that it is an impossibility, if the cool air influence is somehow canceled out. The Great Lake was quite possibly over 30 degrees or more cooler than the air that day. That is big.
CRISIS EUPHORIA, OR HUMANS BEING TRUE?
Working as a volunteer on clean-up after the storm, changed my perception on what being a human in this world of life and humanity, is all about. It is about being there for one another.
{I have attempted to approximate the color of some funnel clouds proceeding classic unusual greenish tint. It has been said (in a very liberal sense) that hail is natures tornado watch. Usually a hail storm would require some other atmospheric spin in differing level winds through the atmospheric vertical profile. I believe this greenish to yellow brown strange cast to some thunderstorms, again very liberally, is considered natures tornado warning, along with any notable rotation in a wall cloud or descending cloud structure of course.}
and from my local photos taken during last years monsoon period, these three.
and
(photo’s above are from my yard during 2007 monsoon season storms)
(one below is from a movie taken from my yard, so quality is not too good.)
When you see that unusual color you will probably know it. For me it carries an ominous sense to it; clouds usually are never that color, especially away from sunset or sunrise. I have not studied the color issue. Long ago I heard a theory that tornadoes might be a type of natural motor, with some kind of ionization creating the odd sky color. Many tornadoes seem to have a lack of lightning, but not all. Transformers and other power sources exploding can make it seem like lightning at the bottom. Not all storms with the greenish color by any means, all produce known rotations. And some rotating storms never produce the intense spinning of a funnel. Many variables can make or break a storm at nearly any time while they are forming and going through their life cycle.
When watching weather radars, rotating storms, usually super-cells, can have quite a round shape on radar. During the radar loop you can pick out at times the rotation of the echo loop. Not all super-cells are round, but tornadic ones setting up a continuous flow (possibly relatively long lasting) can have a little hook near the trailing edge (often south-southeast side of storms moving from a southwest direction). There is where the funnel can be, near the tip, right above it, possibly causing the radar arch in a counter clockwise manner that gives the image a tail point.
When these are embedded in a lot of storminess in a line, they might be called “a dog foot” taking on a remote notion of the same. (There are on rare occasion clockwise rotating funnels.) Lone storms out ahead of a squall line or storm filled front, are sometimes good candidates for unimpeded development to high intensity. Sometimes, if a “bow echo” line runs into one of these, near the touch point may become a rotation, with the intense dynamics of the merger. Part of why tornadoes are not just standard set ups one can predict ahead of times.
Super-cells can be moving along a dry-line or other frontal or air flow boundary (ahead of and parallel to the front), seemingly stretched along its angle of movement. The movement seen in the radar loop and the darkest points in the storm can be near the rotation. Usually Doppler radar picks up the differing speeds on the opposing wind echo sides of the funnel, giving them quite a sure signature of at least a funnel cloud. Take their indications seriously when you here that spin is detected by radar. Do not wait for a weather spotters report for confirmation. You might never have time to hear it.
On many occasions I have called a storm as having a tornado by my above radar viewer depictions, before the weather service does. No ESP necessary. They have to type out and clear the info. for the newscaster, which probably accounts for part of the delay, and or wait for the severe weather expert to confirm the suspicious indications.
I hope I was able to give you some information regarding tornadoes that will help to keep you safer in the future. Nowhere in the US can be said to be absolutely immune from their development, well, maybe in northern Alaska and exceptions like that, to be more precise. Cold air funnels (a more upper air event) could conceivably cause an incidence above a high mountain range, but do not quote me on that!
Tropical storms and hurricanes often produce relatively weak tornadoes usually in the north-east quadrant of the system, where instability and, shear can spin up cells quickly. The problem with their “weakness” is that depending on the storms other wind speed added in, the EF-1 for instance might in effect go up a notch or two on its ability to enhance damage. And micro-burst can do much damage as well, and are ever a threat to planes landing during thunderstorms. As you might know, storm lines setting up a “bow echo” on the radar can produce hurricane like winds as they rush through from one direction, able to knock down trees and power lines.
During monsoon season here, we quite often get rotating clusters of thunderstorms called a mesoscale convective complex. These organized storms set up a small somewhat temporary low pressure system. Sometimes, as they decay overnight, they effect the next days storms. Too much clouds can prevent next day heating and instability. The low circulation might focus the next days formation. Residual outflow boundaries might ignite storms early the next day off to the edges of the prior days storms. Lots of variables.
Our southwest monsoon season is highly dependent on humidity, days heating, pressure set ups, stearinf currents, and often orographic caused starter storms, the days valley heat rising up the mountains. Storms form, then may or may not move out, or their outflows start new storms a bit away.
Dust devils near Tucson have even knocked over mobile homes on cement blocks. I have seen sheet metal roofing flying blocks away 30 feet into the air, creating a sudden commotion, just to let you know on rare occasions they approach possibly F-1. We had roof shingles torn off the middle of our roof by one last year. Noise, trees rustling intensely, a twenty foot otherwise small branch breaking off a tree as I looked, and going up into the sky full of leaves, swirling dust column, bags and possibly a few birds. These dust devils do come out of the blue, and on rare occasions get kinda scary. Often, you might not see it, but dust devils can have a reverse spinning companion, hundreds of feet or up to a half mile or so away.
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This Tornado chase by Jim Reed will get you to some amazing tornado footage.
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(The title of this page; TORNADO CHASIE, refers to my many future encounters with tornadoes, or funnel cloud producing storms, that occurred shortly after I moved to a new home in places across the country. Believe it or not. I speak of those coincidences on my X-Filez page.)
