Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Some new thoughts on Transformative situations

I was reading some articles by Ken Wilber and Andrew Cohen, they were talking about Integral Spirituality and it gave me some ideas about what to do about the problem I was having in the Free Will to go through transformative situations, the chapter after Minerva's conference with Odin and how to deal with shadow elements.

When I made the analogies to "V for Vendetta" and "The Bitter Suite" episode of "Xena" it was more that they didn't give their full consent so that any benefits they gained from them would be tainted by the duress. But the other side of that is if you consent to do what a teacher asks then isn't that consent enough, even if you don't know all the methods that teacher is going to use? The ego defenses aren't going to allow any circumstances that are going to allow it's hold to be broken so some amount of misdirection is going to be needed to get around those barriers.

I think that trust in the one that is going to lead you through the situations of transformation is necessary and that is what pulls through the stress that the ego goes through to accomplish transcendence. In the case of V and Evey I do think that trust was abused by the degree of suffering and not worth the benefits that the tranformation achieved, probably because it was also flawed in V.

Friday, June 15, 2007

Revver Paying off

I guess it mostly takes time to build up a library of videos since it seems the more you have the more they generate revenue.


I uploaded a video to Revver with angels, demons, princesses and dragons.



One with spiders and snakes



and one about the Promicin stuff also I'd have more earning it's keep.



It took since last November but I finally was able to buy something with the money I've earned for the videos. I went to Barnes&Noble and ordered a copy of Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, by Ken Wilber and paid for it out of my PayPal account. It was cool that they shipped it in about 4 days.

Thursday, June 07, 2007

The Haves and Have Nots

That's what most power struggles come down to since though that have all the resources want to keep control of them away from those that need them also. It has worked through the ages to provide a lot of drama in plots and USA Network is using it for this season of The 4400 TV show with the masses and the government on different sides in the battle for Promicin which is heating up into a civil war.

When I checked the web site I found they had the idea for an online ad campaign similar to what they had for the Snakes on a Plane movie. I thought it would be cool to participate in it so I came up with a story to post on Promicin Info and a video for YouTube.




Hopefully it'll get more exposure both for the show and for me.

Saturday, June 02, 2007

Choices

There are a whole lot of them and not all of them are simply either/or like Tony Blair was trying to tell people, it's not as easy as Should I stay or should I go? Unfortunately the choices he made weren't very popular since the people he trusted and that trusted him made some poor choices.



Through experience hopefully we learn from the consequences of our choices methods of making better choices. That doesn't always happen though, as George Santayana has often be quoted as saying "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." The lessons of the 60's seemed to have been ignored, and we're having to face all of those tough choices again. I was very puzzled by that until I found a possible way to explain it by what Ken Wilber calls Boomeritis a pathological state of consciousness that particularly afflicts Baby Boomers. Boomeritis is characterized by relativism, narcissism, and an aversion to hierarchy.



Part of what the problem was in order to break the bonds of conformity the held the culture in sway beforehand was that people fell victim to narcissism so instead of protesting the war, civil rights and other freedoms for equality sake, a lot of peopl did it for selfish reasons, so that they have to face those choices again since they didn't learn from them the last time.

Boomers do happen to have a particular and, of course, unique historical role in this development. As Ken Wilber writes, "The Boomers, to their great credit, were the first major generation in history to develop this capacity. That's a very important point.... The Boomers moved beyond the previous cultural stages of traditionalism and ... scientific modernism ... and pioneered a postmodern, pluralistic, multicultural understanding.... And that is exactly why the Boomers spearheaded civil rights, ecological concerns, feminism, and multicultural diversity. That is the 'high' part of the mixture, the truly impressive part of the Boomer generation and the explosive revolutions of the sixties...." These revolutions, as partial as they have been, changed forever our sense of human possibility and refashioned the contours of human identity."

That was the part of the positive choices made from the lessons of history, but the part they are doomed to repeat are the narcissism, naturally. Wilber is certainly not the only one who has noticed—how could one not?!—that the boomer generation, which unself-consciously and even proudly wears the appellation "the Me generation," is more than a bit stuck on itself—and has left something sticky on the generations that have followed. Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism and Robert Bellah and colleagues' Habits of the Heart have beautifully and poignantly documented how self-involved and isolated we are. Concerned critics have despaired at how this inflated self-involvement has ripped the social fabric and, grasping to bring order to the chaos created by this unparalleled selfishness, they have often, futilely, called for a return to traditional values. Yet these problems can never be solved by looking backward. The world is changing at warp speed. There is no way back nor is there a "back" to go to. Wilber does what no other critic of the cultural scene has done: he not only elaborates in agonizing detail the corrosive effects of "that strange mixture of very high cognitive capacity... infected with rather low emotional narcissism," but he places it within an evolutionary context and, in so doing, points to a possibility for humanity beyond boomeritis. The solution to boomer narcissism cannot come from looking to the past but only in realizing the demand of the future.



So that some of the choices become somewhat of a paradox like that of the Bodhisattva in that Bodhisattvas take an extra vow of not attaining Enlightenment before all sentient beings have achieved complete Nirvana. But in order to balance things out you have to do both, work on own enlightenment and everyone elses at the same time

Part of that balance is having a good circulation of energy in the chakras that allows you to make better choices, since most of the poor ones come from being stuck in a single perspective with the others blocked



Anodea Judith wrote the best book about balancing your chakras, adding harmony to your life with them and now she produced the best video detailing that.



One of the harder choices how to use the fire in the solar plexus chakra since unless it is tamed and channeled it can burn.



Keeping the liberating current balanced with the manifesting current is a series of delicate choices.



But as Ken Wilber was talking about once you've gotten a more balanced viewpoint and past the "aversion to hierarchy" there is a priority that helps focus your judgement and refine your choices. The more views and perspectives that you can include, the better your choices can be.

Friday, June 01, 2007

Happy Chat

I was able to catch Happy Slip in one of her online chats today. It was a lot of fun. It’s amazing that she can keep up so well when the text is going by so fast, 6 web cams showing and phone calls coming in. I was very impressed with her multitasking and humor.



Her latest video was about Dancing With The Stars and I’m not sure but at the end of it, I think she meant what Casey Kasem used to say, "Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars."


I’ve followed DWTS from the 1st season and instead of a being picked to dance with Apolo Anton Ohno she'd be paired up with a professional dancer since she's such a well known celebrity. Someone like Tony Dovolani or Maksim Chmerkovskiy She could’ve give Apolo a run for his money and probably even delivered a knock out to Laila Ali


It wouldn't be the other way around even though she looks a lot like Karina Smirnoff with a better sense of humor, they’ve all had a lot more professional training, for example, Karina is Five-time U.S. National Champion, World Trophy Champion, Asian Open Champion and Ranked second in the world. Even though Christine is funnier and more talented at comedy, she'd have to go through the training involved in the show to compete at the dancing.

It would've been just as funny if she did the video with the roles reversed the way the show is set up though, since I'm pretty sure they have auditions for the stars also. Maybe she could've imitated a few other stars that failed too.

I uploaded a video for YouTube with a soundtrack of Lady by The Little River Band, I guess it wasn't as popular a song as my last one. I suppose their is no accounting for taste right?