Meditations in My New Corset

I turned on my laptop and the wireless wasn't working. I thought, "Oh God, the wireless antenna is broken again. It will cost hundreds to fix. I can't do any of my computer work for many days. OMG."

Then I was like, waaait a second. Something unexpected just happened that I perceived as unpleasant. My gut instinct was to nearly pray, "Oh Powers That Be, don't let this thing be broken". Well I actually consciously don't pray for this type of things because that feels a bit…petty.

I restarted the computer and the wireless was fixed. "Thank God!" was my thought. I've been thinking about this for some time now actually. How silly of me to think of unpleasant obstacles or difficult situations as something I need to pray to be free of, or something to let get me down. How can I know that a 'stupid' thing that happens isn't a blessing??

Whether it's my karma burning, a nudge to some new direction, or whatever - I should be as grateful for a 'negative' thing as I am for a 'positive'. As a spiritual creature, I think of God often and do thank Him a lot when amazing things happen. But recently I've started to thank Him and feel gratitude while I'm brushing my teeth, or walking up stairs, or when nothing is really happening. Those moments are just as amazing because He is just as present.

Am I making any sense? Do you like my corset? :)

A Seeker's Journey :: From Lame Suiciety to Spiritual Inebriety

I promised some pics from Kaisu's gallery opening - they're coming! Meanwhile let me share with you Philip's life story :) He wrote it for another thing but I thought many of you friends might be interested to read it too. So from here on it's Philip speaking (or Prahlada, which is his spiritual name).
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Ever since I was a kid (like as long as I can remember) I knew I wasn't part of this world nor liked it very much. I always knew there was more to life than what I saw on TV, the newspaper, and when I walked down the street or heard in school. I used to not be able to sleep due to thinking about eternity, time, other dimensions, life on other planets, God or if there was such a thing, consciousness, the power of the mind, blah blah etc.
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I started avidly reading books about these subjects. At that point in my life I was really interested in paganism, witchcraft, natural living, Native American traditions and mysticism. I realized that politics are all lies and corruption and the people that really run the government are not the people on the television but the people that own the major companies of the world.

This lead me to start questioning things like my own thoughts - were they actually my own thoughts? Or thoughts that were acquired by me from the media, society, "friends", family, etc. Naturally the next question was what are my own thoughts, and who am "I"? I had no interest in college, and I didn't know what to do.
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So I went on Grateful Dead tour. This is when Jerry Garcia was still here and it was still awesome. After traveling around the USA for some years with the Grateful Dead and going to Rainbow Gatherings, and spending my spare time with Earth First and other cool organizations, I realized the purpose of my life was to spread spiritual music, knowledge and food. Then came the question what the best "spiritual" was. After Jerry died and dead tour stopped, I spent weeks and months in libraries just studying religion, science, ancient cultures, mysticism, yoga, etc. After all my traveling around the country, experimenting with drugs, questioning priests on real spirituality, living at Buddhist temples and intentional communes, and reading so many books, I was frustrated because I felt that I had still not found the absolute truth yet.
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At this point I met someone who just returned from South America and told me of a place in the rainforest I could go where there was a native tribe of people with a powerful mystic tradition still living in the Amazon. I decided to give up on so-called civilization (or as I called it, suiciety) and go there and find this tribe and live with them for the rest of my life. But I was a little scared so I figured I will go to Hawaii first to practice and see if I could really do it. So I lived there in the forest on the beach, just eating fruits and nuts that were growing wild, and meditated all day.
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Just so happens down the beach there was another guy doing the same thing. Sometimes we would meet and share our realizations, and maybe a coconut that we had just climbed up a tree and picked fresh. He told me about Krishna and it was fascinating. So I picked his brain and learned as much as I could retain. I found that everything he said was everything I always thought to be true but just lacked the words to express it. He said it was all coming from these ancient books.
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Ever since then (15 years ago) I have been traveling the country trying to share this wisdom with others.


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Do You Have a Camera? A Tip on How to Live in the Moment

We got into talking about cameras, and our friend Mathura had a good point. He used to be a photographer but gave that up in pursuit of organic farming and self-sustainable living (I wrote a bit more about that in a previous post). We agreed how nuts it is that nowadays everybody, including myself, is almost like obsessed with taking photos or video of anything even a little bit extraordinary. 

He said, “You’re not living in the moment when you take that photo - you’re thinking that you’ll enjoy that particular moment in the future. Then in the future when you’re looking at those pictures, you’re living in the past, thinking about that time you were there. So in either case you’re not living in the moment. For God’s sake, live in the moment!”

(Here is a perfect example. We happened to be in Washington DC on July 4th, when they had huge fireworks on the National Mall, polluting the air for miles. I watched some of it, and of course, took a bunch of videos and photos, with which, I doubt, I'll ever do anything at all.)

If you think about it, satisfaction can only be experienced in the present. As soon as you think “Oh, I’m having a good time” - it’s gone, because the time you announced having as “good” has now moved to the past and now you’re having some other type of time. More precisely, you’re now having a time of reminiscing how good your time was half a second ago, and, in reality, you have lost the satisfaction you then had because you’re now lamenting for something you used to have in the past.

I feel tempted to dive into a spiral of more and more examples, details and elaboration on the subject but will resist - this is enough food for thought for me for the time being. Heehee.