Category: Personal Development

“The only devils in the world are those in our own hearts.”

by kendunning, posted in Building our future., Mental Health, Oppression, Personal Development, Spirituality
Fotosearch_k17282832 (1)
(c) mrdoggs http://www.fotosearch.com

Mohandas K. Gandhi is quoted as saying:  “The only devils in the world are those running around in our own hearts. And that is where all our battles ought to be fought.”

Is this true?  Or are there spiritual forces originating from outside us which bedevil us?  Sometimes I perceive that there are spiritual forces present around us which do try to exert influence upon us.  To push us this way or that.  However, in order for them to succeed, we have to be providing them with the opening, the thought/feeling processes, which they can then add impetus to within our minds, our hearts.  In other words they can energetically “nudge” us the direction they desire us to take.  Sometimes possibly more strongly than others.

Even if this is true, it in no way lessens import of Gandhi’s statement.  Because if we are paying enough attention to our own mind, our own thoughts, our own feelings, we can own our own direction.  Truly be the Captains of our own ship.  If, on the other hand, we do not pay enough attention to our own thoughts, feelings, we can be exposing ourselves to being manipulated via “handles” we didn’t fully realize we were subject to.

By engaging in a process of paying attention to our own thoughts and feelings, we can provide ourselves with true autonomy.  True freedom.  We can decide if we really want to be kind, considerate, empathetic, or rude, inconsiderate and heartless.

On our path to such a state of autonomy there are challenges we face.  Most, if not all, of us have been through traumas, times when we have been hurt bodily, or emotionally.  We can have gone through times of chronic stress, anxiety.   Or times during which we have had certain thoughts, feelings, values imposed upon us by others.  Those times leave an imprint on our psyche.  Those imprints can influence our lives, our behavior for years, decades, after the condition or event which resulted in the imprint has past.  These types of imprints can be some of the hardest challenges we face.

Often, to us subjectively, these imprints can be so deeply imbedded, and/or so old, have been with us so long, we may not recognize them for what they are.  We may consider the thoughts and feelings stemming from such imprints as “normal”.  We may believe that everyone carries a similar orientation as a part of their innate being.  But nothing could be farther from the truth.

If we have, somehow, had fear, hate, a judgmental orientation toward something, maybe a people or a place, or a behavior, deeply ingrained within us, we can truly believe that the thoughts and feelings we experience when we are exposed to those people, places or behaviors are entirely normal.  That they are truly an innate part of our being.  And being such, they are from the source of our life.  From God, divinely ordained.

How much suffering, how many wars have stemmed from exactly that illusion being mistaken for reality? 

And it isn’t just that carrying around such imprinting may cause us to harm others.  Carrying around such imprinting can also result in our regarding ourselves in an unrealistic, negative, derogatory manner.

Engaging in an ongoing practice of examining our own thoughts and feelings can be difficult.  We may not like what we find.  Sometimes these revelations can be emotionally, even physically, painful.  Yet, even when that is the case, there is cause for gratitude:  because we have found it.  When we have found it, we can enter into the process of changing it.

One thing we should all know about such processes of change is that they usually (always?) take time and repetition.  Deeply ingrained feelings/thoughts tend to occupy networks inside our mind, our spirit.  We will find ourselves facing the same, old, thoughts and feelings over and over.  They gradually emerge out of the nooks and crannies of our mind.   We need to endeavor to be aware, as often as we can, of what is happening and to consciously intervene in our own lives at those times.  We need to edit, replace the old thoughts with those we want to replace them.  By doing this, over and over, gradually we will retake ownership of our own lives.  We will have “cleaned house”, so to speak.  Sometimes it takes less time, sometimes more.  But it is inevitable once we make the firm decision to mindfully take back the control of our own life.

 

 

 

 

What is the nature of the future we are creating? Will we have a place in it?

by kendunning, posted in Building our future., Community, Economics, Environment, Innovation, Personal Development, Politics, Science, Spirituality, Unified Field

Oliver and the fishIn case you haven’t become aware, throughout the U.S. and other places in the world, we have been being sprayed from airplanes with metallic nanoparticles for years now.  We breathe them in, they permeate us.  Also, they are toxic, they accelerate forest fires, and they contaminate the soil and water.  Now powerful microwave stations are being set up across the U.S. and other countries (5G). What we know from the study of human brainwave activity is that the potential to affect human brainwave production with external sources of stimulation is very real. We can be induced to be anxious, angry, docile, sleepy, even dead, via external stimulation at varying frequencies. I have worked in this area for years doing neurofeedback and have seen how even a small amount of external stimulation can drive our brainwave production up or down the frequency spectrum.

By turning us into even more sensitive walking antennas through infusing us with fine metallic particles, the potential to be able to externally affect us with microwaves increases. Does anyone think this is being done with the intention, the plan, to somehow make us healthier and happier?

There are people, rich and politically influential people, who want to see us gone from the face of the Earth.  This is not some hidden agenda, it is written and there for all to see, if one looks.  The Georgia Guidestones, Agenda 21, and other sources reveal this agenda.  They believe there are too many of us. They have collectively hoarded trillions of dollars, built vast underground bunkers, some quite luxurious. Some small cities. What we common folk represent to them are people with needs. Needs they don’t want to have to think about.

The technology, the resources exist for all of us, literally every person on Earth, to have happy healthy lives. But that requires those who have captured the vast majority of worldly resources to want to use them for that purpose.

What is our future going to be?

What we have been doing through hating one another, fearing one another and being willing to abuse one another, is feeding the mean spirit of those who love material wealth more passionately than the spirit of life itself.  

We can turn this horrible pattern of events around.  To do so we must turn to our source, the Universal Creative Spirit, God, and embrace love.  Not a passive, complacent love,  but an active, vital, love.  An active, expressed, caring for life itself.  We must realize it is us who must engage in the nurturing of ourselves and the beautiful planet we call home.  We must lovingly, but firmly, resolutely, expect it from ourselves and from others.   It must be our creed, our guiding motive.  Doing so we all can not only live, but thrive.  We can experience personal development beyond anything we are commonly taught to expect.  Working together, we can heal not only ourselves but our planet.

Or we can continue with the fearful, hateful, short sighted, egoistic, greed-filled, patterns that are tearing our lives and our world apart.  It’s entirely up to us.

 

Postscript:  While the mainstream news media pretty much ignores the dumping of tons of toxic metals onto the U.S. and other countries, some information is making it’s way to the light of day.  Here are some videos which shed more light upon the subject:

Ted Gunderson was the former Director of the F.B.I.’s Los Angeles office, and a couple others. After retiring from the F.B.I., working as a private investigator, he began to discover truths he had never imagined in his career in law enforcement. By all accounts, he was killed for it. There are many videos on YouTube of him reporting his findings. They are shocking, a lot of people will find them difficult or impossible to believe. His videos are indispensable to anyone trying to get a clearer picture of what is going on in the world, and why.  Ted Gunderson on chemtrails.

Documentary:  What in the World Are They Spraying?

A typical bureaucratic response:  Interview in Shasta County.

One of the Most Important Questions Facing Humankind Today

by kendunning, posted in Building our future., Community, Environment, Personal Development, Politics, Spirituality, Unified Field

Ripples 1For most of my life, the U.S. has been involved with one war or another.  My young life was very much affected by the Vietnam war.  I remember when it was over.  I thought maybe sanity would have a chance to take hold of the world.  It looked like it might, for a while.  But that was only an illusion afforded me because I had no idea about what was taking place in the private rooms of the power-brokers of the world.  Other plans were being laid.

There were a few involvements here and there, Granada, Lebanon, and others.  However it still looked to me like maybe we (the people of the world) were on our way toward a more harmonious existence.   I do believe that is what the majority of the people in the world, the common people, want.  When the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, that seemed confirmation that a positive trend was indeed happening.  But again, that illusion was only afforded me, and in retrospect a lot of other people, due to ignorance of the plans the rich and powerful had in mind.

As time has gone on and I have learned more about what has precipitated the wars of my lifetime, I have learned the leading cause can be summed up in one word:  greed.  Of course if any country tries to fly the banner of “greed” to enlist the support of the common citizenry, it probably won’t go very far.  Nope.  So other banners have to be flown.  The favorite ones seem to be “freedom”, “ending terrorism”, “human rights”, “democracy”.  Stopping communism from spreading was the rallying cry during the Cold War, but we don’t hear too much about that anymore.  Except connected with the Presidential election cycles.  I think a while back those who have been able to construct an economic matrix which funnels the vast majority of the world’s wealth into their hands, realized two things:

1.  It was/is important to not let the manipulations and inequities of the system being developed to become a mainstream issue.  This means finding/inventing reasons which direct the public’s attention in other directions.  One of the ploys has been to create a faceless entity “the economy” as a peg on which, with little or no grounding in the day to day world of the general population, explanations for financial conditions can be hung.

2.  It is important to keep the attention, the dissatisfaction, of the general public directed toward issues which drive a wedge between different factions.  (And away from the reality of what is happening with the wealth that is being produced.)  Racial, religious, ethnic, gender, along with a few other issues of the moment, have lent themselves well to keeping the public’s eye off of the wholesale looting of entire countries that is going on.  By widely and repeatedly publicizing aspects of these issues on which there is disagreement within factions of the general public, and framing the news coverage in as inflammatory a manner as possible, a great distraction can be achieved.

So here we are, facing a world which is on the brink of a war chasm as deep and dark as any humankind has faced in recorded history.  With the possible exception of the Cuban missile crisis and one or two other events of the Cold War, we have never been this precipitously close to a potentially nuclear war.

The past few decades there has been an underlying, insidious, movement within the worldly “powers-that-be”.  A movement away from organizing principles such as unity, equity, fairness, compassion, kinship, and toward more divisive ones:  individual identity, competitive acquisition;  a winner-take-all ruthlessness that regards others as little more than abstract entities to be used, and/or discarded depending upon the agenda of the moment.

The cultures of the “developed” Western world have had a lot to do with this unfortunate evolution.  One major contributor has been the emphasis on individual wealth, fame, power that has been increasingly pervasive since the post WWII period.  It is interesting that such a development would take place on the heels of a period in which unity, combined effort, and a worldwide recognition of mutual interests, had played such a critical role in preventing the conquest of the world by ruthless, authoritarian powers.

Considering the current world situation, the current values being exercised, it is enough to cause one to wonder who did win WWII?

Right now we, the people of the world, have been lied to about a lot of things for a long time. We have been lied to by governments, industries, religious leaders, even those from medical science and other sciences. We have been so programmed with lies and half-truths, that for any of us to develop a solid understanding of what is going on in the world is a herculean feat.  Yet we get caught up in the storm and fury.  Usually coming from a place of caring about something in the world which we see threatened, we throw our perspectives back and forth at each other.  And our perspectives on world events, even national events, are often based upon the half-truths and lies the “authorities” have shared with us.

What do we want to be the defining value of our world?  Individual aggrandizement or collective well-being?  That seems to be a dichotomy today’s conflicts all revolve around.  It’s not a matter of whether or not to have a one-world-government, a one-world-bank, an economy based in free enterprise, capitalism, or managed as democratic socialism.  It’s not even whether or not to have a democracy or a monarchy.  The question on which everything going on in the world hinges upon is none of these things.

The question which determines how viable any system is or isn’t is, how viable any culture is or isn’t, whether there will or won’t be wars, is this:  how do we, as individuals, regard one another?   

What do we think about one another?  How do we feel toward one another?  How do we treat one another?

You know what we are aren’t hearing from our leaders in governments, industry and even too rarely from the leaders of the world’s religions?  That we are all brothers and sisters and we should be loving one another and treating each other right.  If all of us would do that, if we will turn our backs on all the urgings from all the different sources that we should fear, hate and attack one another, we will be fine.  All of us.   

We have the resources and the knowledge, as never before in recorded history, to do what is beneficial for humankind and this beautiful planet we call home.   All we need is the will to make it so.

It is probably unrealistic to think that everyone, all around the world, can forget about, let go of, all the hateful, fear-mongering propaganda we’ve been being fed for decades.  But unless some of us do, unless enough of us do, the future does not look bright for humankind.

A beautiful aspect of this reality is that it doesn’t take a college degree, it doesn’t even take a high school diploma, for us to know how to treat each other right.  All it takes is for us to first be honest with ourselves about how we would truly want to be treated in any given situation, and then working to treat others in that manner.  To have empathy.

One key, which is absolutely essential to this effort, is for us to know the answers we accept, for how we want to be treated and then how we intend to treat others, are based in love.  If they aren’t based in love, they’re based in a falsehood.  

 

We Can Heal Our World

by kendunning, posted in Building our future., Community, Economics, Environment, Fixing our Culture, Healthcare, Mental Health, Personal Development, Politics, Science, Spirituality, Unified Field

IMG_1010My life from early adulthood has been focused on learning what I can about mental, physical, and spiritual health.   I’ve managed to accumulate time in 5 colleges, earning 3 degrees.  I’ve accumulated countless hours in workshops, seminars, trainings, not to mention all the I’ve time spend reading studies and research reports.  I’ve traveled a good deal, seen a lot of different cultures both within and outside the U.S.  Also, I’ve spent time in 4 different jails and 2 maximum security prisons (one in the U.S., one not).  I’ve spent time with people from all walks of life:  doctors, shamans, people holding high governmental office, engineers, rocket scientists, writers, outlaw bikers, priests and ministers, drug dealers, prostitutes, psychologists, veterans and draft dodgers, bankers and bank robbers, persons inside the intelligence community and the mob.  Hippies (I’ve experimented with many psychoactive substances), wealthy “straights”, a lot of musicians, the homeless and some with multiple residences, murderers, artists, bartenders, hermits, socialites, social workers, nurses, people from every race, sexual orientation and religion.  At one time I have sat across the table from and had a conversation with a cannibal (we weren’t having dinner).  I could go on, but even I am getting weary of the list.

Where I am going with this is:  all of these people, all of them, are much more alike than dissimilar.  

This is our reality.  We are all so similar; it’s like we’re all from the same, very large, family.  This being true, how have human actions and interactions gotten so fucked up?  You would think after all those experiences I might have encountered some answers.  And I have.  Why do we so often mistreat each other and destroy what we need?  The reasons all come back to something one of the shaman I spent time with shared with me:  “All sickness is sickness of the mind.”  I know, what about germs:  bacteria, viruses, parasites, etc.?  Yes all those things exist and all of those things, and more, can and do affect us.  Yet, when we track it all down to the least common denominator, to the source that saints and prophets, spiritual leaders have been informing us about for centuries, and which quantum physics is now confirming, the instruction I was given by the shaman back in the early 1970’s is absolutely correct:  “All sickness is sickness of the mind.”  As a matter of fact, what is becoming increasingly clear, is that all that is, is of the mind.  But for now, for this post, I’m going to try to stick to sickness, and health.

It took me a surprisingly long time to realize that the inverse is also true:  All health is health of the mind.  Now, that is something to weigh into.

That includes your or my personal sickness or health, our families’ sickness or health, and up to and including the sickness or health of cities, nations, and the world.  Whatever the case may be, the origins of it are in our minds.  Does this mean that all the doctors should just send their patients home with prescription that says:  “Think Healthy”?  No, although positive, healthful thinking is never going to hurt the situation.  Our reality is a little more complex than that, our minds are more complex than that.  But on the most profound and inclusive level of our being, it is that simple.  We get to decide a lot about how things are going, both within our personal body and, collectively, within the body of humankind.

Let’s heal our world!  There are three criteria necessary for us to heal our world.  That’s all.  With these three criteria met, we can build a world which can be a nurturing, supportive, exciting, wondrous home for all of humankind.  And a much more hospitable world for all other living beings, and species, upon this planet we call home.

These three criteria are:

  1.  The Resources Needed to Create and Sustain It.  In spite of all the doomsaying about depleted and disappearing resources, we have enough to handle the population of the world, and then some.   Our problems have never been about insufficient resources, not on a planetary scale.  Our problems in this area have all stemmed from our management, or mismanagement, of what we have.  For one thing, we have allowed various resources to become like pieces on a game board for certain players to capture and hoard.  This is a horribly dysfunctional manner in which to manage the precious resources of our planet.  Another horrible aspect of our mismanagement to date is the quantity of resources we have allowed to become unusable due to our too often  cavalier regard of them.  This includes polluting our precious natural resources in the name of monetary profit.
  2.  The Knowledge to Engineer the Reality.  There also is no deficit in the knowledge needed to heal our world.  Again, not on a planetary scale.  Today, too often the most potentially beneficial innovations and inventions are often shoved into a closet.  Effective treatments and cures for illnesses, which aren’t the potential money makers for those who currently control and monopolize healthcare and pharmaceuticals, are either ignored, suppressed or somehow co-opted.  Realizations about better, more efficient, cleaner energy resources are ignored by those in power in deference to the money being applied by those controlling the archaic, dirty, systems which have managed to monopolize world industries.  If we were to measure the what, when, where, how and why of the resources and methods we employ in our day to day lives by the yardstick of human well-being, we would find we have all the knowledge we need to create and sustain a culture which provides for all of us, with food, housing, education, jobs, medical care, opportunities, and with abundant, exciting wonders to go around.
  3.  The Will to Make it So.  One might think this would be the most readily available of the three criteria.  Who, in their right mind, wouldn’t want a healthy, thriving, prosperous, exciting, wonderful world for themselves, their loved ones, friends and neighbors?  Especially as we’ve already seen centuries of what the alternatives are:  war, death, illness, suffering, hunger, homelessness, hopelessness, depression, stress, anxiety, loneliness, trauma, abusiveness, every plague; physical, mental and spiritual, known to human kind.  We get to take our pick.  The will to make it so is the only criteria which is the stumbling block right now.  Are we going to opt for the sickness or the health of it all?  

It is easy for anyone to look at these three brief descriptions of the criteria needed to heal the world and think:  but that’s not enough details.  We need more details!  The reality is that all the needed details are readily available.  All it takes is looking to find them.  Articles, videos, books, information detailing innovations which provide all the materials, engineering, health related and sociological knowledge needed to heal our world exists.  It is waiting for us:  online, or in the libraries and, most importantly; the minds of people around the world.  It’s all there, ready to be accessed.

Just to “prime the pump” of awareness a little, start looking at the possibilities available if only we would optimize all the uses of hemp.  Look at the health benefits we would reap if only we would clean up our environment, eat organic food, lower the toxic burden on our bodies.  Imagine the benefits of increased nutrition, education and health care, along with decreased stress.  I’m telling you, it’s all here, now.  All we have to do is want it enough to make achieving it, bringing it into reality, the organizing principle in our thoughts and actions.  If we do that and truly act it out, treat each other how we would genuinely like to be treated, we’re there.  We’re home.

Too idealistic, too utopian?  That’s the sickness which has crept in and set up housekeeping in your mind talking to you.  That kind of thinking has kept humankind involved in all manner of war and other inhumanities for centuries, millennia.  Negativity, egoism, jealousy, envy, greed, self-defeating thoughts, grudges, apathy, depression.  These are a few of the common psycho/emotional stumbling blocks we have to overcome to realize that which is actually our birthright:  a bright, incredible future.

We have a birthright!  The primary reality it is incumbent upon us to understand, to embrace, in order to realize our birthright is this:  we are, all of us, children of the Universal Creative Spirit, the Divine, God.  We are family; we are interrelated and interconnected.  When we learn to treat each other not only with equity, trust and civility but with love, then, as a global community, we will be opening ourselves to the full benefits of the divine and transcendental nature of our being.

I feel it’s important to interject here that a global community and a one-world-government, are not one and the same.  Throughout history diverse people have managed to more than just “get along”.  Very different cultures, races have prospered together.  Today, more than every before in history, people’s lives are made richer, more enjoyable through experiences of other culture’s food, art, music, dance, science, medicine and more.  We don’t need a one-world government, but we do need people from around to world to share a few basic values.  Such as mutual respect, honesty, fairness.

This moment in history, when the world is “smaller” due to advancements in communication and transportation, and when the world is more vulnerable than ever due to the destructive potential of modern weapons of war, learning how to co-exist, to live in harmony is more imperative than ever.  If all people would adopt a few basic, user-friendly values, we could all enjoy our diverse cultures, experiences, and do so in harmony, rather than in conflict.  It is so logical, so available:  all we have to do is desire it, will it, then act in our own best interests.

Don’t Play The Victim To Circumstances You Created

by kendunning, posted in Building our future., Community, Personal Development, Politics, Spirituality
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

“Don’t play the victim to circumstances you created.”  I saw that statement on Facebook and it hit me like cold shower.  Wow.  So simple yet so profound.  I would alter it some to read;  “Don’t play the victim to circumstances that you helped to create.”  The latter statement sums up what is going on with the issue of illegal immigration to the U.S.  The U.S., as a nation, is experiencing the consequences of decades of supporting tyrants and greed in Mexico, Central and South America and elsewhere.  Everyone who believes it is too much trouble to  pay attention to politics needs to wake up, politics can and will affect your life!

What do we expect when some U.S. corporations have been engaging in profiteering too often at the expense of and to the detriment of the common people in several Central and South American countries.  While, concurrently, the U.S. government has been spending hundreds of millions of dollars supporting leaders and methods which render countries unlivable for vast numbers of the populations of those countries?  

We cannot as a people continue to ignore a simple reality;  we need to be working to build a culture which is supportive and nurturing of whole and healthful human life.  And we need to support such efforts elsewhere.  What we are doing now, as a matter of national policy and culture is worshiping the “bottom line”.  It’s all about the money.  We have become a species in which too much of what we, as a species, are engaged in seems hellbent in destroying our environment…and ourselves.  Often or always in the name of corporate and/or personal “profit”.  It seems too many in positions of political and industrial power have narrowly defined “profit” to include only monetary or material gain.  This is proving to be a very costly error in reasoning.

In order to correct things one thing is certain, there needs to be balance brought back into our economic reality.  There is an absolute need for us, as a species, to recognize our mutuality and keep each other’s well-being in mind.

Why focus on something so mundane as money rather than lofty sentiments about love and/or spirituality?  Because what is happening with the material wealth we possess is a visible measure of what is happening with our spiritual reality.  I don’t think that we’re all greedy, or callous to the well-being of our neighbors, however, look at what’s happening in so many places around the world.  No matter all the high platitudes being written and spoken, platitudes about love and beauty, the truth is how we treat each other speaks much louder than the words in book or magazine or the music on the radio.

We usually think of external/worldly change happening as a result of an internal change, however, the reverse can also be true.  Sometimes when we realize the absolute need for an external/worldly change, and act upon that realization, the dynamics precipitate a fulfillment of the change within our psycho-emotional make-up.

So, as we look around at the increasing poverty and suffering of the many on one side of the scale and the extravagant, inordinate wealth of the few on the other, isn’t it obvious what needs to be done?   The only question is how is it going to happen?  Because when things get too far out of balance, the natural tendency toward a viable balance will assert itself, that’s as inherent a reality as gravity.  (As above so below, as below so above.) Will it happen in a caring, thoughtful manner or in a chaotic, traumatic series of events?  Like so much else that happens in this world, it’s all up to us.

July 2017: I need to add that the predatory exploitation of developing and/or “third-world” countries has not been limited to individuals and/or corporations headquartered in the U.S.  Nor is the government of the U.S. the only government which has a history of supporting, even subsidizing such exploitative activity.  And finally, the problem of refugees and immigrants from countries which are suffering in significant part as a result of such exploitative activity is not limited to the United States.