What's So Great About Keeping A Daily Journal?

I have been keeping a journal for what will soon be 30 years, so I think I am in a position to tell you what is so great about it. For one thing, you can leave some interesting literature for your descendants to read. They can read about mistakes you made, and the things that you did right which made for a better life. What I have said is what it will do for your descendants; what about what it will do for you?
First of all, it can make you a better writer. Practice makes perfect, as the old saying goes. Where I learn most how to write better is to proofread and correct everything I write at least once, sometimes more. A person can be his or her own judge. It would be nice to have a teacher grading and correcting you, but if you pay attention, you can detect your own errors. If you are typing your journal on a computer using a word processing program, it will point out your spelling and grammar errors, but don't depend too much on the spell checker. I got a letter from a young man once who was writing about being in college. He spelled college collage, but the spell checker didn't tell him he was wrong, because collage is a word too. One thing you learn in writing your journal is to pay attention. One good way to proofread is to read out loud. Your ears may hear an error you make when your eyes miss it. Reading aloud is especially useful in determining where your commas should go. Being a good writer will impress your employer, and perhaps lead to an advancement.
One unexpected benefit of writing, for me at least, has been that I get ideas while writing. I guess you could say that it fuels my intuition. It should do the same for you. My son is a very good writer, and he told me something I had not thought about. He says that I do introspective writing. You can look this up in the dictionary and perhaps hear a more complicated definition, but how I define it is this: I ask myself questions and then work to find myself a good answer. I have been told that some great thinkers arrive at their answers in this way.
Writing can be useful in getting rid of addictions. When I started writing I was a chain smoker and drank too much beer. A great doctor named Viktor Frankl explained that addiction is caused by what he called "existential vacuum." Some would say simply "boredom." Writing is one way that you can overcome boredom. I no longer smoke, and I almost never drink beer these days. I plan to keep on writing each and every day as long as I remain sane and my fingers can still press the keys.

Learning Comes From Many Sources

Oprah Winfrey and Maya Angelou are on TV saying that they are children of God. I think they are terrific ladies, but it seems to me that we are all children of God. I realize that some people don't behave as if they were children of God; in fact, they act as if they were the children of some devil. How do such people come to be? My opinion is that such people are simply people who were born to chaos and have not evolved out of it. One might ask, "Why does God make bad people? Why doesn't God just make people perfect in the beginning? Isn't God an all-powerful being who could do anything? Here is the answer that came to me. God is not only the Creator; God is the being who is being created. God is the totality of all things, the All-That-Is. Everything is creating Everything. We are the clay from which we are creating something better. We are evolving by way of trial and error. We cannot expect to have a perfect life with no challenges because it is challenges which form us. Some say that life doesn't make sense; it's just a lot of suffering. I believe there was a bumper sticker going around one time that said something like, "Life is hard; then you die." Would life make a lot more sense if it had two parts? And, those two parts are a body and an eternal soul? The eternal soul never dies; the body is something one has for a limited time and then it goes away leaving the eternal soul; but the eternal soul can go into a new body whenever it chooses and live another earth life. Perhaps what God created was the eternal soul, and then God gave us the responsibility of living a life of right and good. Each soul is to make the best of the body he/she gets. Each soul is responsible for learning what it takes. Each soul is responsible for evolving into someone good. Another way to look at this is that we come to Schoolhouse Earth to learn how to better ourselves. When someone we love leaves his or her body, he or she has not died. He or she will be born again.
What I have written here is not any sort of final truth. It is simply something for you to think about, something to stimulate your thinking. You may not believe any of it, but perhaps there is something here from which you can learn. I hope that there is something here that arouses your mind, or feeds your intuition. Even stupid people can sometimes teach us. It was something that Maya Angelou said that prompted me to write this. She is a very smart teacher.

The Best Is Yet To Come

This morning I woke up thinking this: The key to success in life is to emulate God by being creative. God is creating the universe. God is the totality of all things, so you and I are part of God. This statement I just made is pantheist. Pantheist is simply the belief that God is All-That-Is. I think this is true, but there is more. Since we mere mortals cannot define God, we might call what we do not yet understand The Great Mystery. That is what Albert Einstein called The Father/Mother of the universe. Einstein's way of thought is what philosophers call panentheism. Perhaps God is also all the things that will come to be. New things are being born every second of every minute of every hour of every day. Creation is not something that happened a long time ago and then stopped; it is what is happening right now. Our best bet in having a good life is to join in the evolution that God gives us. Let us create rather than destroy.
A lot has been said lately about mental illness and people fussing with each other, each trying to dominate the other. It's true; too much of that is going on when what we should be doing is helping people and making the world a better place. We should be joining the creation rather than fighting it. The best is yet to come.

The Best Is Yet t

Optimism Is The Best Policy

My gloves that I wear to bed have mysteriously disappeared. I couldn't find one when I was going to bed and the other was gone this morning. My wife says that I was taken by aliens during the night and they forgot to put my glove back on after they performed experiments on me. I definitely remember putting on my face mask at bedtime, but it was off when I woke up this morning. The oxygen machine was still going. I think the aliens found a cure for the common cold, because when I went to sleep I had a cold, but now I don't. Maybe instead of aliens, it is angels taking care of me. I am, after all, an optimist. Why not believe the best? My Aunt Charlotte sees no evil, hears no evil, and speaks no evil. Because of this she is well liked and is living a long life, 99 years so far.
I believe that I had a heart attack in 1991 because of frustration and anger. And, a couple of years later I came close to another heart attack when I encountered a con artist disguised as a business manager at a Nissan dealer. I think it was these two events in my life that helped me become an optimist.
One thing some old people do that is self-defeating is that they think they are too old to try anything new or even learn anything. I see that as pessimism. I believe in living as long as I am alive. I even believe that I have an eternal soul that will continue after my earth body wears out and dies.
Some say that I have schizophrenia because I hear voices, but if that makes me schizoid, I don't want to be cured. A while back I asked myself, should I be a blogger? One of the voices said, "Definitely!" So, here I am blogging.

Marvelous Children

“If only I knew then what I know now.” How often have we heard people say this? These days we often hear people speak of their children or grandchildren in this way. “He (or she) knows things that she (or he) was never taught.” Or, they might say, “My grandchild is more intuitive than I remember kids of my generation being.” Something we hear even more often, “If you want to know something about a computer, ask young children and not adults.” What can we conclude from these observations?

I believe that more than one thing is going on. Modern Christians are taught that there is no such thing as reincarnation, but Hindus, some Buddhists, and I all believe that we have lived before, and that it is possible to carry knowledge or skills over from one life to the next. It has been shown that Oriental persons have IQs higher than the average American Caucasian or Black people. The Oriental people are more likely to have the expectation of knowledge and skill being carried forward.

It is likely that a baby being born into life now did not experience computers in his or her past life. This brings forth something that more of us believe than believe in past lives. It is “intuition.” The dictionary defines this in a few different ways, but basically, it is knowing something without being taught. This explains, as an example, why children under ten years of age can learn a second language much faster than teens or adults.

Perhaps I should just say that that children come up with are just mystery, but I prefer to speculate on what it actually is.

Saviors

When it is cold like this, the expression, “colder than a well digger’s ass in Montana” comes to mind. Sergeant Monroe said that. He hung out with some of us privates; I think it was at Fort Lewis, Washington where we were getting ready to ship to Korea. He was full of stories about his family and of his adventures in the army. I remember one particular story all too well. He was in Korea during the war, and was assigned along with another soldier to take 110 prisoners to a prison camp 20 miles away. He was told to be back in 20 minutes. He said, “We were,” indicating that they had killed those prisoners. I wonder if they were forced to do that by circumstances, or did they kill them just because it was the most convenient thing to do?
I hate war, and always have. It is stories like that one that reinforce my dislike of war. It is too often a case of humans being less than human. Such incidents are all too common. I never fought in a war, so I can’t say what sort of pressure those men were under. What about those soldiers at Wounded Knee, South Dakota in 1890 who killed about 300 Native Americans? The Natives were having a religious ceremony, dancing and asking The Great Spirit to get rid of the white men and bring back the buffalo. There was no command given. One soldier fired his weapon and the others followed. Were the soldiers punished? No, they were given medals for shooting unarmed civilians, mostly women and children.
A sign was put up at that site saying, “Battle of Wounded Knee.” Fern and I were there a few years ago and we found the sign had been changed by the Natives to “Massacre at Wounded Knee.” It was a massacre and not a battle.
Vice-President Dick Chaney was on TV last night telling that the Bush Administration accomplished great things while they were in office. He made it sound like we were all saved from attacks by hoards of terrorists with nuclear weapons. On the face of things, it looks like he could be right, but I doubt it. The administration was failing miserably, and started a war so they could pretend to be our saviors. If they had not handled matters so poorly, I might believe it; but, the results have been that they did more damage to American citizens and other innocent people than to any terrorists. Our economy is a train wreck. Many people in the world who were our friends now hate us. Cheney lined his own pockets by giving lucrative no-bid contracts to a company he had been CEO of, and likely still owned shares in. I think we can at least say that the Bush administration were bad managers.
It seems like humans are constantly trying to get even, to get back at groups they believe have harmed them, and all that leads to more and more war. Maybe it’s a natural thing to keep populations in check. The wars between Christians and Muslims go back something like 700 years. The Muslims and Jews are killing each other daily here in recent weeks. These sorts of things are something I will never understand or get used to.
What will happen in the future? I like something by Alan Kay I read on a wall at a high school. He said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” I think he was right. We can make this a better world by our own efforts.
Many Christians now portray Jesus as a man who will come back to Earth and punish all the bad people, and take the good ones to Heaven. This comes from the last book of the Bible, Revelation. Common sense seems to have flown out the window. God gave us strength and brains. Let’s use our resources to make this a better world rather go around spouting dogmatic crap. I like the Jesus who said, “Love one another,” and a few other wise things. I think that if he were alive today he would tell us to help others and make the world a better place to live. He was a good man who preached wisdom, but he was a mortal man who died nearly 2,000 years ago. We need to stop dwelling on personalities and dwell on the good. We are One with God, a part of everything that is. Our responsibility is not to destroy; our responsibility is to create a constantly improving Universe. Let us make a good future for our children, our children’s children, ad infinitum. We have found the Savior and He/She is us. We don’t have to form an organization called Saviors United; we are already that. We need only to realize who we are and move forward.

The Real Garden of Eden

The most important, meaningful, and desired things we humans want are other humans. Alone, we are nothing. How we treat each other is perhaps the most important thing that we ever do, and we should do it right. This is not the subject of this book today; it is the foundation for what I woke up thinking about.

There are two things that all animal life, including humans, need. We need clean water and abundant plant life. Breathing is life, and it is plant life which supplies us with oxygen. These bodies we live in consist of water more than any other material. Plants not only provide us with oxygen and food; they also preserve, clean, and control water. This whole system of plants, air, and water is the very system that makes our lives possible. This is obvious; yet, sometimes it seems that people live as if they don’t know this. We are often our own enemies.

The most meaningful and purposeful things we humans can do on this planet are to take care of each other, animal life, plant life, air, and water. We are part of the Animal Kingdom, but it is the Plant Kingdom that provides for us. We must take care of the Plant Kingdom because it takes care of us. Let us worship the God that invented and gave us the two-kingdom system; and, let us worship the system as well, by properly doing our part in keeping it functioning.

After breakfast I plan to go out and work in the system. I will be carrying several cutting tools. If plants are so important, why am I cutting them? If we destroy plants, we are creating desert. If we let plants grow without tending them, we are creating jungle. If we care for plants in an intelligent way, we create gardens, orchards, and forests that sustain life. In Biblical metaphor, we create the Garden of Eden.

When winter comes and the Garden of Eden goes dormant, we can develop our intelligence and strength so that when spring arrives we will be ready to do our part in the Garden once again. I feel like this would be the ideal way to live the spiritual life.

I have made some simple statements, and now I feel like I should move on to something else. There is a lot more to life than tending the Garden of Eden. Maybe I should move to dancing and singing, or writing prose or poetry, but first I want to create a meal from the stuff of plants and meditate while I eat it. Then in the cool of the morning I will return to the Garden alone and tend to her needs. I will give her a some water, a trim and paint her fence.