A Day in the Life of...

I have been renewing my Microsoft Certifications. Between training at work which generated 12 hours OT and studying for this latest exam, I am beat. I passed BTW in 20 minutes. Wondering if the CISSP will be as easy. To sleep, perchance to dream. It's a pretty autumn day today. Nothing of import it seems in the news. Nothing of import as far as experiences go. Many blessings to all. May you hear the roar of stillness.

I started eating at a local diner again on Saturdays. I used to have breakfast there every day for over two years but quit when I got this job at this telecom. The youngest daughter of the owner opened the diner this morning and she waited on me and another customer. We had an interesting conversation that was a bit surreal.

She's a teacher for the Plano ISD now and only works part-time at the diner. She asked me if I was interested in teaching and I told her that I'd tried to get into teaching back in 1995 or 1996 with little luck, so I'd given up. Then the conversation turned to quantum mechanics and I told her a little of what I knew. It then turned to reincarnation, without any prompting from me, and she told me about a dream where she was a young girl and she was underground with her family in a sewer system hiding from soldiers trying to kill them. It sounded like a Jewish family being hunted down by a Nazi SS death squad. She didn't think the dream was true until she watched Schindler's List and saw the exact same thing on screen. I wasn't surprised. It just reaffirmed what I had been told by my Uncle John. She mentioned that a little 6 year old girl was consoling her Mother over the death of her little brother. The little girl explained to her Mother that her little brother knew he wouldn't live long and that he went back to Heaven. She also mentioned that the little girl said that she liked this world because Heaven had no color and this world was full of color. Truths from the mouths of babes. My uncle mentioned that young children know or see things and that adults would discount their observations or knowledge until the kids gave up and believed what they were told to believe. I didn't understand how he knew that until almost twenty years later, but I intuitively knew he was telling the truth. I told my friend not to think of it as reincarnation, but as Consciousness living and experiencing through a continuation (or succession) of bodies. Tolle says that Consciousness is evolving. Well, everything is evolving. People are striving for something. Trees are trying to be better trees. Cats are trying to be better cats. I've noticed my cats are fascinated by water, so maybe cats are evolving to where they aren't as hydrophobic as in the the past. But it makes sense. If the conscious spark is the only constant and bodies or forms are shed like skins, and everything changes, even the conscious essence within, and the outside is a reflection of the change inside, then what?

If everyone you meet is essentially yourself, each individual's humanity masked by ego, does that knowledge change anything? Do people need spiritual teachers? What about those people who became spontaneously enlightened by events in their lives without teachers? Wouldn't those events suggest that the requirement for a spiritual teacher is delusion? That one is still looking outside oneself instead of inward where truth is to be found? Doesn't history suggest that organized religions are essentially misdirecting people away from the core truths they were founded upon?

Renew or get your passport now if you want a fairly secure one. This article explains why you should.

Driving home from work Monday morning, the sunrise was exquisite, the Sun just peeking over a dark gray lonely rain cloud, rays of sunlight bursting everywhere. A thought pops into my head, the Rising Sun, the symbol on Japan's flag in WWII, such a beautiful, spiritual symbol. How could such a spiritual people embark on such a mad endeavor which leads to the destruction of their nation, the death of their young men, the deaths of so many innocents and not-so innocents. But the sun beams are so beautiful and you can see the whiteness of the cloud behind the grayness as the sunlight backlights the cloud.

I sleep mostly soundly all day. Get up, shower, then am out the door for another twelve hour night shift. Driving to work, there isn't a lone rain cloud. The whole horizon is lined with rain swollen clouds and thunderheads swelling into the stratosphere. An even more beautiful sight then this morning. The witty line from Terry Pratchett about "some people coming positively alive during thunderstorms" pops into my head and I smile at the reference to Frankenstein's monster.The westward setting Sun isn't behind the thunderclouds quite yet. Sun beams everywhere. Awesome, spectacular! Love, love is shining through the clouds. Love shining on the small beings, human ants, driving across this vast planetary surface. Love shining on us even when we can't see it whether behind a rain swollen storm cloud or on the other side of our rotating planet. An absolute truth. A spiritual metaphor for what? I am always loved and never alone even during the darkest hours of my life. I am a part of that universal essence, but I can't feel that love and oneness now. What of the storms that cross my visage and hide my love and beauty from the eyes of others? My moments of madness. Are they gone, or are there storms to come? If an entire people can self-destruct, if the Japanese and my brother can self-destruct, then why not Americans? Why not me? I've died in a way, but I went the other way. Why me, and not Jim?

This article in the NY Times details new research showing that the degenerative diseases due to aging are an anticancer strategy. In other words, your body has two choices, live as long as it can by gradually degenerating from oxidative damage and insults to your cellular DNA (biological form of "rust"), or die earlier from cancers due to proliferative stem cells. The body chooses the former. It shuts down stem cells the older they get. Likely, the repressor in question is linked to a signal transduction system that monitors cumulative DNA damage. As one of the authors pointed out, caloric restriction is proven to increase life span in mice (and it's been proven in other animals as well). Caloric restriction probably increases stress proteins that can repair or reverse some of the damage, but primarily, it works because the mitochondria in the cells don't have enough food to produce lots of ATP. If they don't have enough food, then they don't produce as much DNA damaging radicals as they normally would, lessening the cumulative damage to the nuclear DNA in each cell. Caloric restriction increases life span about 20-30%. You can fast every other day, or just reduce your caloric intake by a third, about 1300 Calories a day. Or, you can quit worrying about living a long life and enjoy the moment.

Watching The Weather Man. Read the thoughtful review. Like the following dialog:

Robert Spritz: David, sacrifice is... to get anything of value, you have to sacrifice.
Dave Spritz: I know that Dad, but I think that if we continue down this road, it's gonna be too detrimental for the kids. It's just too hard.
Robert Spritz: Do you know that the harder thing to do and the right thing to do are usually the same thing? Nothing that has meaning is easy. "Easy" doesn't enter into grown-up life.