A Day for Personal Reflection

I have often thought that there should be at least one day set aside for personal reflection. Two days come to mind: my birthday and December 31st. Although birthdays are more personal and I do reflect on that day anyway, I have chosen Dec 31st to be the day more appropiate for me as my day for personal reflection. Not only do I think it is important to reflect on the year gone by but how the footnote I will be leaving behind is progressing.

It’s a time for me to be more retrospectively introspective (I just love tongue twisters, don't you?) and consider some of the choices I have made or failed to make and my inner-motivations for those choices. Have I lived up to my potential, my self imposed expectations (at least the reasonable ones) or perhaps have I succumbed to the expectations others have placed on me? Have I fulfilled what I consider to be a productive period in my life?

In past years, I usually never really come to any firm conclusions even though I felt it important to take the time, stop, listen and reflect on whether what I have or have not done has led me in the direction I feel I should be going. It is so easy to get distracted, undisciplined, and careless if I let my focus sway or I lose my concentration when I'm doing any task I may see as important. Perhaps I've being too perfectionist, perhaps not. Perhaps it's also wise to realize that in the end, I won't be the judge of my footnote, others will be.

This year there have been a few surprises I've had to face. Some long-term friendships have ended, but I have made some new ones with people who I think will prove to be pivotal in my life. I have also started this blog, which I think has finally provided me with the proper and comfortable format to articulate some of the ideas I have had for years but could never quite put in written form. So for me it's been an interesting year.

Happy New Year.

On The End of All Things

"To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep; to sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause..."
HAMLET [3/1]


I have often reluctantly concluded that my problems are here to force me to think about my life, re-evaluate my choices and motivate me to change the way I deal with my reality. Many times in the depths of depression I have been drawn to suicide as a credible option for change and release from this place where (cause and effect) rule the way my life plays out. Many of the stings and arrows that I have been forced to endure were of my own making. The choices I have made or avoided, that I have construed as negative, bad or painful are all part of my failure to come to one basic conclusion: I have created my own reality by screening what I have been subjected to through the interpretations of my personal neurosis and forgotten my own advice about trying to develop objectivity about my own experiences.

If I were to re-examine my experiences, follow my own counsel and learn to refrain from placing a good or bad verdict on their meaning, retaining some objectivity or view them as tests of character that force me to look at aspects of my life, would I be as fatalistic as I have been on many of them? I wonder. Although life is not easy, it does have a simplicity that offers itself up in every single choice that has been presented to me: listen and learn to trust my inner-self which has its own wisdom, follow the melody of my heart as it resonates what is real and what is illusion and construct my life through the eyes of the wisdom that I have gained from understanding why I have lived the life I have lived. Hopefully I can remember not to judge my mistakes or failures too harshly.

Even if life can be reduced to a few simple and clearly stated tenants, what appears easy is never quite as simple as it may initially seem. It may have seemed easy to others to watch Picasso create a drawing in less than 60 seconds then watch that same painting sell for several hundred thousand dollars, but it took him a lifetime to develop the skills and artistic control to have done it that fast and the notoriety to be able to sell it for as much as society might deem its artistic worth.

Very often I have viewed some obstacles that I have wrestled with as failures of my character which have led me to judge myself less than worthy. This has simply perpetuated those feelings by causing me to get so depressed that I don't see the larger picture of what my experiences are trying to teach me. It's a way to distract me from taking control of my own destiny by creating a diversion and taking me farther away from the truth that I need to reassert. I am not perfect and I should not expect myself to be .

Depression only serves the purpose of diverting us from being effective in finding a solution to whatever problem we may be dealing with at any given moment. I would argue that most habits of a physical nature (for example, the inability to give up a drug addiction) are not a weakness in our moral character. Simply saying that one should give it up because of the medical documentation illustrating its impact on the body ends up adding to the depression when results are not achieved simply based on that medical fact. Attacking our moral fiber only adds to that denigration.

A more productive way to effect a change would be to recognize it for what it is, an addiction that "all flesh is heir to", study and plan (with help from others) more effective approaches to giving up the addiction in a way that doesn't exacerbate the situation by creating an impossible goal, which when we fail will further damage our self-esteem by making us feel so negative about ourselves that it leads us to conclude that the addiction itself is interpreted as the deserving consequence of that moral failure. It would be more helpful to focus our attention on ways of eliminating the habitual patterns that led to the addiction in the first place. Suicide then becomes an option which - appearing initially as a light when our emotional self judgements are at their most negative - would be seen for what it really is: the end of all things we will experience in this life.

If we were put here to learn the lessons that this plane (cause and effect) has to teach us one lesson should be clear: We are not here to jump ship and end it because we feel our life has become too overwhelmed and beyond our individual capacity to effect.

If we can recognize that life's struggle is worth grappling with and whose positive outcome lends support to the conviction that the struggle itself is of value to our evolutionary development, then suicide becomes less of an attractive choice when things get difficult.

On Tarot, Crystal Ball, Tea Leaves, Palm Reading and Divination

Although these forms of divination have all been around for centuries, they exist because people have a need to know what their future holds. Perhaps they think that the future - something that doesn’t exist yet - is already set and fixed, that if they know what it may be, that they will in some way be able to feel more comfortable with their present.

In truth, people don’t really want to know what their future truly holds but rather they want to know whether their future is a good one, a happy one, a place where things will make them content and satisfied. So to say that people are open to "hearing" about their future (if it could be heard), is not quite what they think they are searching for.

People don’t want to be told bad things or things that they most fear, the knowledge of which may already exist some place in their preconscious, or subconscious mind. They want to know that what they already fear will not happen. Many people search out those who are experts in Tarot, Tea Leaves, Crystal Ball and Palm Reading. They think that one of these occult forms of reading might give them more information that will validate not only their future as promising, but their present as well. When they hear the things they want to hear, they feel that the validity of this divination is verified, and they go back to their lives comforted that their future is assured as a fulfilling place that will hold promise for them. They provide hope, whether false or genuine.

If however they hear that things will not be good or that something they most fear might actually happen sometime in the future, that reinforces the growing fears they already have. They tend to attack the reading as if it’s a personal reproach on them, and their future. The truth is that the readings just told them things they didn’t want to hear. And when people hear things they are not open to or really aren’t ready to be told, for whatever reason , they tend to close up and raise doubts about the method this information came to them.

In general, this is how people handle fortune telling: They are drawn to them like magnets because of their need to know. But most people also have a simultaneous fear to hear what might be told. On the other hand, some people approach these forms of divination as opportunities to learn things they need to consider in helping them make better choices for the future. Those people have less fears of uncertainty and more confidence in using any information to help them plan their future.

This so far has answered why people go to fortune tellers, but it still doesn’t say anything about its accuracy, how it works, whether the future can actually be told at all? Or whether we should even be searching for answers to something that doesn’t exist yet.

The basic principle behind all methods of divination is the same. It’s a way for the reader (fortune teller) to tap into an energy source that is part of another sense beyond the five senses (hearing, tasting, seeing, feeling, touching), that some claim they have some mastery of. It's almost like a form of hypnosis or meditation for the reader (fortune teller) to pull this energy in and use it to pick up information on the seeker. What they actually pick up, and what they are tapping into, is yet another issue. But if you believe there are other senses than the five senses already described, then the reader perhaps is tapping into something.

Now we come to the question of whether it's possible to tell the future if the future doesn’t yet exist. If we take the position that the future is defined as a range of possibilities that can happen given the present circumstances, as in quantum physics, there are infinite possible effects for any given present action, then what the reader may be doing is simply describing one of those potential results that is part of the infinite set of possibilities that can occur. Are they then predicting the future itself, or just a possible future that can happen or may not happen? Since there are other possibilities that can occur, what would make the teller's prediction come true or not?

Again we come back to the issue of Free Will. Does the seeker have the ability to change the course of what might happen or perhaps the question should be: can the seeker in some way effect or make happen one or another of the infinite possibilities? I believe he can. Sometimes knowing the trends of one's life can get someone information that might impact which trend dominates in any given situation. If we know that our family history contains certain genetic diseases, we don’t have to go to the fortune teller to learn the likelihood of getting this disease in the future. We can be more alert of our health. We can seek out medical treatment more rigorously to catch something early or prevent what may already be in our path.

Although I have not described precisely how these four fortune telling techniques work, it's really more important to examine why people need to have their future foretold in the first place. If we feel we have control of our own destinies and if we feel we have power to effect the course of our lives, rather than have it chosen for us, then why would we need to go to fortune tellers in the first place?

On Reincarnation

This is the subject I have had the most trepidation writing about, mostly because there is such strong feelings about it. Reincarnation, seen by the West as totally conflicting with Judeo-Christian Theology, has been so misunderstood especially here where it's been associated more with people who have rejected the commonly accepted theology of heaven and hell. It never-the-less deserves serious consideration partly because it is held as a credible view by a large part of the world.

I am not suggesting that anyone should believe in reincarnation. I am simply stating my understanding of it, and presenting it as an alternate way of viewing existence that may hold some answers for some.

One of the biggest held misunderstandings is that when one is re-incarnated it can be as an animal or a lower form of life. Humans can only be incarnated as humans. If the purpose of re-incarnation (and existence), is to evolve, the notion that being incarnated as a lower form of life is counter-evolutionary.

Re-incarnation very simply takes the view that the corporeal world is a school, a place where the (human) spirit is incarnated in the world of cause and effect for the purpose of learning and evolving to a level where they no longer need to be on this plane. Once the lessons from experiencing the impediments and obstacles (that are necessary for them to overcome) and attain spiritual evolution have been learned, the wisdom gained, the individual spirit is now ready to move on to another existence.

Some who have reached this level, choose to remain behind and again be reincarnated specifically to help the rest of humanity evolve. These are the adepts, the ones who have to some degree mastered cause and effect, but consciously choose to remain part of this plane and be incarnated again. This is a special sacrifice, primarily because when they re-enter this plane of cause and effect, they are not above creating additional Karma that may complicate their personal attainments. However if personal evolution is the only thing that one is searching for, then we have as individuals missed the point of what sacrifice and selflessness are.

Reincarnation goes hand in hand with KARMA. KARMA is the law of cause and effect while reincarnation is the vehicle by which karma is played out.

If someone creates karma in one lifetime, the karma may play out in another life, or over a series of lifetimes. Reincarnation allows the energy of karmic effects to play out until the spirit learns the lesson it needs to learn from the karma. Once the karma is resolved the individual (spirit) moves on perhaps to deal with some other karma.

This may not be a view that is consistent with heaven and hell as Christians and Jews know it. But it does explain many events in a person's life that may not make any apparent sense. Certain fortunes or misfortunes that occur to people who may not appear to warrant them can be explained if one understands that karma that may have been created in a previous life is played out in another where the person's current life doesn’t appear to warrant such events.

Déjà-vu experiences can also occur with circumstances, relationships, or places, where some feel instinctively familiar with these people and events, and be a result of having had previous lives together, positive, negative or both. Family relationships, close friendships or other kinds of feelings of kindred connections can all carry over from previous lifetimes if there are strong bonds between them or if there is karma to deal with.

I will leave it at this point, and come back to it at a later date.

What Education Should Do

When I refer to education, what I'm talking about is more than just what schools do. That is just one part of it. I'm expanding education to include how a culture, a society, or a country educates the newer generations on the culture itself. Schools as we know them now teach reading, writing, arithmetic, history and science. In universities we learn logic, philosophy, etc. How a society educates its young not only defines its identity but also the way it defines itself for the future. If a society recognizes the importance of education to its existence, then it will make sure to place education high on its list of priorities. Unfortunately, that has not been the case in the United States. Other priorities have been distractions, and this has robbed several generations, of an education that should be worthy of free society, and a country like ours.


I have always been more of a pro-process education vs. content education thinker, and have felt that the first and foremost goal of schooling should be focusing everything on teaching the child the skills to teach himself. It is not at the expense of the basic skills of reading, writing, arithmetic. It's simply filtering everything through that goal.

The basic learning centers we have are the parents (family), the schools, religion, and later the external world (without supervision). The parents give us our first glimpse of the world and our first impressions of it. The schools begin the socialization process along side the religion which presumably deals with spiritual and ethical values. Then we are grown up, and expected to go out into the "external world" and not only survive, but be contributing members as well. This is where it's determined whether a society has been successful or not in teaching its younger generations.

What parents can do is initially set the stage and create the best possible foundation for the child to enter the society via the school system. They can first instill that all important perception that the world is a trust-able place (and also identify the parameters of that trust). They can also encourage curiosity, imagination, and the ability to observe what is going on around them, assess risk all of which will enable the child to make better choices.

All these things are positive things but the one that is most important is instilling in children the gradual ability to be independent of their parents. The parents should want their children to grow to be independent, so they can feel comfortable that their children will survive and do well when they are no longer around.

Schools can do other things too. They introduce the child to his first social group situation. But they can also include skills like anger management and further the development of risk assessment as part of the child's growing cognitive abilities. They have the potential for greater cultural education, skills such as logic and ethics in addition to the basic reading, writing, arithmetic skills, at a much earlier age than is now considered possible through schooling.

Religion or Spiritual institutions, can also teach morality, ethics and things related to the spirit.

One subset to all this is Sex Education. What happens in real life is that the parents are split about wanting the schools to teach it, at least within certain parameters. Religion doesn’t really teach anything about sex except to abstain until marriage. When the schools attempt to teach it, the parents get more ambivalent about what the parameters should be, while religion insists that the schools should only be involved in teaching abstinence. So my conclusion is that the parents should be the ones who have the ultimate responsibility, and should put aside their embarrassment and discuss it with their children, or else they will learn it from the external world without any supervision.

The US government should put education high on the priority list, because if they don’t, future generations will not be able to compete with those that have been educated in other countries and are more equipped to compete in the world market. My approach is simple: focus more on education, because the future survival of our culture depends on it.

On Thoughts And Actions

Although we accept that there is an intimate connection between thoughts and actions, do we really understand how intimate that relationship is?

We know pretty much what actions are. They are tangible, and we can see them. They exist here in the corporeal level. We can be held responsible for them, and we can even be put in jail if they run contrary to what society considers allowable. We also know that actions can have more numerous effects (KARMA) than we consciously or initially intended. They can be causes of other actions which can also have ripple effects that go on to impact yet more things or people then we ever conceived of or imagined at the time they were set in motion. Thoughts, however, are far more difficult to visualize, primarily because they are more introspective, and the connection between a thought and an action is more difficult for others to see when they are not the ones having the thought.

Are thoughts that different from actions? We know that thoughts can have have effects via meditation, and prayer. We may not be able to see them as tangibly as we do actions, but the person having the thought can perhaps visualize in their minds' eye an image of what that thought is, especially if the thought has a visual component to it such as a picture of something or someone. We also know that thoughts can have power, at least with some people, who seem to be able to influence others with their thinking. We also know that a person, who is the subject of the attention by their fame or notoriety, such as a politician or an actor, can feel the thoughts of others focusing on them, sometimes to a painful degree.

Over the years, when I have considered the difference or similarities between thoughts and actions, I have come to the conclusion that they are basically the same. Thoughts, I have reasoned, are actions on another plane, a subtler plane that exists super-imposed but inter-connected with the corporeal plane. Thoughts affect actions, and actions affect thoughts. The only difference between the two are the physical characteristics that actions have since they can be seen by others who are present to view them as they are taking place. Thoughts can be silent, held only by the person who is having them or felt by the person who is receiving them or by others who have special abilities to perceive them on some level that is beyond the five senses we know exist.

If my view of thoughts and actions has some credibility, then are we as responsible for the thoughts we have as for the actions we initiate? This is the tricky part. How do we define responsibility here? We have random thoughts. Some are are "good", some may be "bad". Should we be held as responsible for random thoughts as for those that have motives?

Random thoughts are not as controllable as ones that have motives. They can be akin to instincts, or as unconscious thoughts as in dreams. How do we distinguish the difference? I don’t think we can. Random thoughts perhaps can have unconscious motives, but thoughts that are more willfully directed can have a more energetic beneficent or malevolent energy to them. Those are the ones I think we are more responsible for than random ones.

Legally, we can't be held as accountable for our thoughts, as we can for our actions. But I'm not just referring to criminal law. If you believe in a higher justice which is Karmic, then our thoughts do take on a different meaning which gives it a different level of responsibility than criminal law does, although criminal law does recognize motive, it can't prove motive as easily as it can identify an act that has been committed.

I think it's important to consider that because thoughts may be somewhat invisible, it doesn’t mean that they do not have a concrete element to them. That quality can be tangible, and have an effect as real as any action. Finally, if thoughts are actions on a subtle plane we may not be totally aware of, does that mean because we can't see them as easily as actions, they are any less real or important than actions we can see?

How History Is Taught

History teachers take note: The way history is taught, at least in the United States, is wrong. First of all, I was taught History in the NYC Public School System and that is a problem in and of itself. The American School System would have you believe that American History began with the Plymouth Rock and the landing of the Mayflower, also the "stealing" of Manhattan for a mere 24 dollars. Prior to that nothing is taught. Suggesting of course that there was no relevant history prior to then. Well, what happened to all the dinosaurs???

World History is taught from a uniquely Northern Hemisphere/European perspective, primarily with Western Democracies as its focal point. Again suggesting that modern “civilized” society was a monopoly held by Western Europe. Democracy, we are taught, began with the Greeks; monotheism began with the Egyptians, by some Pharaoh whose name seems to always elude me, perhaps because my brain has been affected by all that NYC smog.

I have often thought that maybe I should teach history. My reasoning goes it will finally be taught correctly. But then, because my brain is affected by the smog, it would be better that I don’t attempt that, but rather stand on the sidelines and simply criticize the way it is taught and then tell history teachers how I think it should be taught.

When I learn about Ancient Greece, for example, I want to know what is happening all over the world at the same time, using Greece as a focal point. I want to know what is happening in Japan, China, Australia, Africa, South America, North America so that I get a more circumspect view of what is happening in the world at large. I'm not suggesting that I be taught every detail about what is going on in the world, but that I get a general sense of how history, culture and societies at large are progressing in relation to each other. Have I forgotten any of the major continents?

The problem with the way history is taught today, according to my NYC smog-affected memory, is that we study one culture, then go back and begin another, and so on without making any substantial connection between them. This method forgets to give a sense of connectedness to what I was saying before about a circumscribed or is it circumcised view of history.

Seriously, history should be taught like current events. Like reading a newspaper of what is going on all over the world at the same time, so a more accurate view of how one civilization is affecting another or at best assimilating each other? Gee, now I feel like Borg.

On Cause And Effect

If I were to ask someone, if they thought that things they did in life, good or bad, would come back to them in some form or another? Most would probably say yes. But if I asked these same people if they believed in KARMA, they would probably respond along the lines: Oh that’s an Eastern Philosophy. I was brought up in a Judeo/Christian family. No, I don’t believe in that Eastern way of thinking.

The point being that KARMA is simply the term Easterners use to refer to cause and effect and a way to make it simple and easy to identify, because it's one word.

KARMA is the belief that when a person causes something, it ultimately has an effect which eventually returns to the person who set up the initial cause. It's also true that this effect can reverberate as additional causes with resulting effects. What is the cause and what is the effect really becomes the age-old question of which came first: the chicken or the egg? The point is, it doesn’t really matter, cause and effect act like a ripple in a pond and where it begins or ends is less important than understanding that it's simply a way that actions and reactions exist on this plane.

What KARMA means is that each individual has a responsibility for his/her actions. How they conduct themselves with others, will bring about consequences that will eventually boomerang back on them in some form or another.

KARMA is also often referred to as “GOOD" or “BAD KARMA”. But the energy is simply the way we interpret the cause and effect relationship. Whether it's defined as good or bad is the personal association we place on it because of how the consequences may effect us emotionally and concretely and how we view their meaning. I prefer the terms "difficult" Karma or "less difficult" Karma.

Understanding our KARMA on any level is very difficult to do. It is not easy to identify one effect to one cause relationship, any more than it is to understand how one perception we have as an adult may have evolved from perceptions we had as children. Often one cause can have many effects. Although we may live in a linear universe, many things may not occur in a linear form.

Rather than to understand how one event may have resulted from one cause, it seems more productive to conduct our lives in a more conscious, ethical way, so that the KARMA or KARMA(s) we create, are causes that have “positive” effects rather then impact "negatively" on others or ourselves.

Accepting personal responsibility for our own behavior, is one way. If we are aware that the things we do in life, towards others are beneficent, magnanimous, and which consider the thoughts, feelings and sensitivities of others, then our KARMA will reflect that. If on the other hand we are thoughtless of others, do things out of selfish motives, discount the feelings of others, and don’t pay attention to the obvious effects our actions create, then our KARMA will also reflect that.

In any interpretation one wants to take about cause and effect, the important point is that it returns the responsibility for our own actions to the place it belongs, ourselves! It removes the idea that our sins can be taken away by anyone but ourselves, and it places the quality of our thinking about our purpose and our effect on others back in the hands of the person who is ultimately responsible for it.

If we accept responsibility for our thoughts and our actions, the choices we make will reflect it, and the effects we create will also show our understanding sensitivity, and recognition of that responsibility.

More on KARMA at another time…..