That is what I said when I saw the Exxon Regular gas prices for the first time while driving around in Sacramento, California. I was angry, shocked and wanted amazed that there were no riots. I glanced over at the docile faces in the cars and SUV to my left and right. “Are they seeing these prices,” I thought. Every seemed to have the same complacent cattle-like expressions of business as usual.

Then it dawned on me that my state, Colorado, and the rest of the country was next. Indeed, $4.00+ a gallon gas was already happening all over the country. Its ironic that everyone talks shit about California, but don’t notice that as the most populace state (over 33 Million+ about 10% of the US population), most mass social issues happen there first. Examples include: Environmental issues, rolling black outs, serious immigration issues, gay marriage ect. Those issues then follow California’s lead or are able to hedge challenges as they develop.

The energy crisis really make me upset. Mainly because I believe that there are solutions RIGHT now to this “problem”. In fact, I believe we had solution decades ago. Moreover, the writing was on the wall in 1973 when member of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) decided that they would no longer ship oil to nations that had supported Israel in its conflict with Syria and Egypt. These countries were: Parts of Europe, Japan and the U.S.). Europe and Japan were smart enough to adjust their dependence on foreign oil, but for some reason the Unites States did NOTHING but beg, borrow and threaten. We sent Henry Kissinger to beg and lie to the Saudi’s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis

Months later Project Independence was born. It was the definition of “fucking pathetic”:

Project Independence was an initiative announced by U.S. President Richard Nixon on November 7, 1973, in reaction to the OPEC oil embargo and the resulting 1973 oil crisis. Recalling the Manhattan Project, the stated goal of Project Independence was to achieve energy self-sufficiency for the United States by 1980[1] through a national commitment to energy conservation and development of alternative sources of energy.[2] Nixon declared that American science, technology and industry could free America from dependence on imported oil. [3]

Some of the important initiatives to emerge from Project Independence included lowering highway speeds to 55 MPH, converting oil power plants to coal, completion of the Trans-Alaskan pipeline and diverting federal funds from highway construction to mass transit

They planed on reducing oil dependency by “lowering highway speeds to 55MPH”! That nor anything else they did got us off of foreign oil. With some of the greatest scientific minds in the world, the most daring innovative thinkers on EARTH “lowering highway speeds to 55MPH” is the best that we could do. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Independence

As the richest most powerful nation in the world, I find it hard to believe we are in this crisis by accident. I don’t know why this would be by design and I am skeptical of “conspiracy” to break the US economy, but a collusion of super rich global countries to make more money by suppressing REAL alternatives seems about right to me.

Who Killed the Electric Car?

When you look at the death of the electric car in California (where it started to happen first), its easy to see greed as a serious motivation behind keeping the status quo at all costs. Why would multi-billion dollar automotive companies, oil and gas companies allow their money tree to wither & die? Why would they support a new technology that might cut into their profits? Why would they take a chance on such a volatile market? How could they have known there would be this kind of crisis today?

Water 4 Fuel – Urban Legend or Epic Historical Tyranny

One legend you can see all over the web is water for fuel mythos. The story is that a brilliant man created a machine that run a car for miles and miles on nothing put water. Its seen by main stream science and engineering as a ridiculous myth that is believed only by those would have no understanding of basic scientific principals. Its one of those odd ball fringe fascinations that are immediately dismissed and categorized with Alien encounters and Big Foot sightings. But What if..? What if it were real? Imagine for a second that this technology has been around since the 70’s. Imagine that it could be put in almost any automobile engine to convert tap water into hydrogen.

Well there are a couple of people who have say that this is not only true but have working prototypes. Their names are Stan Meyer & Dennis Klein. How is this possible without being all over the national news?! Such a discovery would change the world. The oil industry would die out fast. Stan Meyer claimed that the Saudis and others attempted to bribe him to simply sit on the invention or allow him to purchase the device for about 1 billion dollars. He also claims to have been silenced by certain government agencies. He later poisoned. Is this story true? You be the judge. If it is true, humanity has suffered a great, great injustice. Such an invention could have taken us in a whole new direction of less war for resources, a weaker set of oil baron tyrants and war profiteers. Less poverty due to an invention that is powered off of the most abundant element in the known universe (hydrogen) and less famine and death world wide.

Instead, we must suffer at the pump as prices go up and up with no end in sight. And there is seemingly nothing we can do about it but work more to pay more on everything as the dollar is inflated away from its previous value causing us to work more for less and less and less. One must wonder, what is the end goal of a fiat monetary system and what is the meaning of life according to capitalism? To work? Is our life then measured by our networth? Is Fiat paper money’s market value more important that human life?

I question any system that puts an imaginary value over the worth on living breathing sentient souls. “To be” is an immeasurable worth that can NOT be captured by any monetary, political, religious, or philosophical system.

- Synaptic Bursts - Completely meaningless dreams; an Rapid Eye Movement brain fart; generated by repetive body behaviors or just the random noise of life.
- Subconscious Dreams - Message from the dormant, wise and highly perceptive part of the mind that sees and factors the other 90% of life that happens just at our peripheral; often catches cues that our narrow conscious selves do not then gives hints, warnings or information
- Spiritual Dreams - From the hire self; waken in tears of joy or laughing; followed by day of smiling euphoria; difficult to remember sometimes impossible to understand if we are not ready
*there is some overlap - the over all effect of the dream is very telling.

Like Tibetan Dream Yogas of Sleep and Dreams says, I believe it is more important to be awakened in dreams than to interpret the content of the dreams. Like staring at a piece of Art, I believe that the meaning behind the dream can ultimately only be determined by the one who created it, everyone else will see something completely different.

When trying to determine the meaning, it is important to remember that YOU are every part of the dream. All elements in the dream represent some part of you. Even the bad parts. So if you are getting chased by a ghoul, remember that the ghoul is some latent part of you or situation, person, place or thing in your life. You must look inside yourself to determine what part of you that ghoul represents.

To determine what objects in the dream represent what parts of you, it is important to “follow the feeling”. So it is imperative that you be very truthful with yourself. If you can not face how you truly feel about something in ‘waking’ life, it will often manifest itself in your dream. If the dream is important, it will sometimes be a recurring dream.

When I am really wrapped up in the “worldliness”, stresses, distractions of life, work, family, friends I’ve noticed that I often do not remember my dreams. When I am focused and calm in the morning the dreams come to me easily. Sometimes there is more than I have time to write down.

Writing down dreams is a great way to begin to recall the dreams.

YOUR OWN DREAM SYMBOLS
You are the best interpreter of your dream symbols. Dream sites and books can be a good guide. But the dream master is within you. Water to a professional scuba diver is going to mean something entirely different to a hypochondriac.

Regardless of belief, faith or scientific method our real enemy is ignorance. No matter how foul our nemesis, whether terrorist, communist, imperialist and no matter what tactic “they” choose nothing will defeat “us” like our own ignorance.

Wisdom favors untainted facts. But too often a nation, a man, a woman, an organization, an establishment chooses to build up their wisdom on myths, half-truths and bias; a house of matches in the middle of a forest fire. The real enemy is our own ignorance. Any perceived enemies are only the puppets and pawns of ones own master, ignorance.

Even forces of nature and states of human suffering are not the enemy. Famine, poverty, sickness can all be defeated with the proper knowledge of “how”. What defeats us is lack of knowledge, ignorance.

The human species is capable of knowing but we project our enemies outside of our selves. The real enemy is within… it is ignorance. There is not a single person, place or thing, no force of nature more cruel and unforgiving as our own unchecked ignorance.

Why do we continue to serve this callous master? Sufferings seems limitless and our ignorance is no excuse. Above all hypothesis, and bias, and prejudging assumptions and long held beliefs, factual information is the greatest ally of humanity.

Perhaps, one day theists and atheists will be able to agree on that statement. Because if your a believer and you think that God is infinite than you can understand that there is no way a finite mind can understand it. So words about the infinite are meaningless. And if your an Atheist you don’t believe in a creator at all so the words point to nothing.

There is no God but no-thing.
It is the ultimate contradiction such that we can only look in awe at the mere concept of infinity. It is something literally beyond belief because it is completely beyond logical understanding. So nothing at all can be said about it that is either true or false.
To look at the mere concept of it too long through the lens of rational thought is suicide and madness like staring directly into the sun. Just ask mathematician Georg Cantor.

Its fair to say that what ever event, situation, point, being, incident, accident created us, is our “creator”. For a true skeptic, “creator” is perhaps too much to commit to, but it is fair to say some phenomenon started what we are now experiencing. Language and mathematics can only go so far in explaining the phenomenon because no matter how accurate and/or beautiful it sounds, it is still just a symbolic representation of what is really going on. Symbols and language are our revolutionary methods of interfacing, but also the walls that box us into our filtered little worlds for this reason the wise realize that they really don’t know much of anything.

Whether you are atheist or true believer or somewhere in between we can all agree that something or nothing we can currently understand began what we now experience. We are the seeds of that amazing occurrence; we are the fruits of something (nothing?) that originated time/space matter and energy. We are of something that is much greater than matter, space, time, energy. Why shouldn’t we access that greatness? A better question is How can we?

The Universe Allows Extinction and Genocide
I watched a movie called “Sometime in September”. It is a very sad and moving movie about what happen in Rawanda in the ‘94 in which nearly 1 million Tutsi’s and moderate Hutu’s were killed. The most power part for me is when the Hutu extremist sought to divide up a girls Catholic school by Tutsi & Hutu and the girls told them “We are sisters” and died together.

The movie made me think of other atrocities such as slavery and the holocaust. I thought of the 6 million Jews that were killed in Nazi Germany and about all the genocides and extinction level events that have been successful in this planets history. It is clear to me that there is some natural order of things that does not respect any individual, group or species. But the irony is that the human mind at its full potential could really survive and/or conquer most of natures destructive events (including our very own self-destructive tendencies). I don’t believe that Rawandan genocide had to happen (and could have definitely been stopped quickly), the holocaust did not have to happen, and humanity does not have to self-destruct or be taken out by catastrophic events.

Unfortunately, our greatest fault is that we (as a species) do not value life enough. We value our OWN lives (little egos) but can not usually see too far beyond that. I’m sure it will be different one day, but currently, we are a species that values our own egos over life itself and that is very sad. Life is the most valuable commodity on this earth.

We are the miracle we have been looking for. There is no God but the light of life shining within each of us. The body dies but life is an energy subtle enough to be called “nothing” that can neither be created or destroyed. We are that.

Here is a graphic novel rendition of a religious experience that he had:

PKD experience

I truly believe that it is the people that make the marriage. Its the individuals that make a good relationship or a bad relationship… realistically the marriage is just a legal document and the ceremony turns into a memory. Another thing is you really can’t believe what you think you see because you just never know what is going on behind closed doors. Sometimes it looks bad, but its two people who are truly, madly deeply in passionate love and other times it looks good but its rotten to the core. My wife and I have out lasted most of our friends and have become freaks among a generation of divorce. I’m definitely not bragging…

And I would NOT say its been easy. It has been one of the hardest thing I have ever done in my life… and I had a pretty rough childhood. If I told you the shit that has happened you’d be riveted to my words. It would read like a pornographic Tyler Perry story (the ones without Madea). I’d be lying if I said its all good. After about 5 years some things get old.. REALLY old. Some things become so comfortable you can’t even imagine ever having been without it.

If nothing else, when you give everything, when you put it all on the line, all of your fears, all of your vulnerability, all of your pain on display for your mate and when they can face that VERY human element when the glowing teenage infatuation is gone and still love what is left, then you’ve found a pretty special person because not many people are up to that task. Even less are ready for the truth; in fact, they avoid it like the plague.

When you really open up and really learn to trust, it is like a roller coaster ride, its scary, and exciting and passionate. It scary because there it a real fear of being hurt, tossed out and dashed on the rocks, betrayed and killed. After a while it can make you sick. When its all over you can walk away a whole lot wiser, but only if you were true to yourself. And that is what I’ve learned about life, love and marriage.

“Above all else, to thine oneself be true” — Shakespeare

Stephen on February 6th, 2008 11:01 am - Sorry but this numerology stuff ranks with a great deal else as metaphysical discussion. It is IMO a diversion from what is real and a retreat into ways by which thought constructs are made that may appease but do not really satisfy a quest for what is real. In these matters I am guided to some extent by Krishnamurti who walked away from his guru status when he found … reality.

me on February 6th, 2008 11:09 am - Stephen,

The truth, source, reality (whatever title we give it) is untouchable by any explaination. No words, or math or syntax no matter how complete and beautiful can express it properly. All we can do is point. This is just a method of pointing and expressing. I agree, thought constructs have there place but I think a lot of times we get ourselve in trouble when we worship them as idols. Dogma has become the new golden calf.