A Day in the Life of...

Somehow I missed the equinox this past week. I've had trouble sleeping the last two weeks probably from the inane time change Congress forced upon all of us. Instead of doing something that will have a significant effect such as mandating that everyone switch to hybrid vehicles by 2015, or that more nuclear powerplants be built.

(The government builds and owns them in Nevada. They use a modern design. They burn plutonium. We eliminate our excess nuclear weapons grade material and at least get some money back in the form of electricity for all the taxpayer dollars spent making and refining the weapons grade plutonium in the first place! Screw the soon-to-be private TXU! Think about it. There was a proposal to mix the plutonium in with nuclear waste and bury it in Yucca Flats. Doesn't it make sense to extract the energy from that plutonium first and convert it to electricity rather than just get rid of it? We shouldn't leave that stuff lying around.)

My car has tree pollen all over it, so it's a got a green tinge. Every car in the apartment complex is covered in green pollen grains. The last few days I've been suffering a hormone storm. There's the biological urge to procreate and it's strong. I suppose that I should be grateful. It means that I'm alive. I'm shocked to discover that whatever part of my brain that deals with that drive can almost overwhelm my higher brain functions. Reason mostly won out over desire, but desire won a few battles in a way. I guess reason won the war. In the past, I never reflected on what happened when such an urge hit. Perhaps I gave in and reverted temporarily to a very unconscious state. Maybe I'm full of it and just spouting BS. Maybe it would be better to be a Buddhist. At least they have no hangups about sex although they don't condone adultery.

According to this article, a high fructose diet causes obesity in rats. Researchers use rats in physiology studies because their biochemistry closely resembles ours. Food manufacturers switched to fructose as a cheap substitute for sucrose in processed foods. Fructose is now pervasive in our diet. Beverages, be they fruit drinks or soft drinks, use high fructose corn syrup instead of sucrose these days. I wonder if the obesity epidemic started at the same time that manufacturers introduced fructose into our diet. If the people responsible for introducing fructose into our diet were made to pay for the additional costs to society due to obesity and other diseases should fructose be proven to be the underlying cause, would they switch back to sucrose? Would they even admit that they made a mistake if this is true? Nothing personal, we were saving money to make more profit. Do they let their children eat their own products? On the other hand, it turns out that there's three kinds of high fructose corn syrup that are used. In soft drinks, the amount of fructose to glucose is approximately the same as if sucrose were used as the sweetener. Sucrose is one molecule of fructose bound to one molecule of glucose. I should drink more water.

If you go down to the quantum level, particles are being created and destroyed from one instant to the next. So called virtual particles are created as particle/antiparticle pairs from fluctuations in vacuum energy. Particles springing from nothingness. How does that mirror consciousness - thoughts springing from no thought? Does thought spring from nothing? Is that nothing what some call pure consciousness? Is that label, pure consciousness, meaningless? Does it point to some thing, or no-thing? Energy is not a thing, not matter, but matter is nothing more than condensed energy. Is this making any sense?

There is the I, the self. It is old, wise, and timeless. It loves to play and is curious about the world. It loves to create and destroy and create again. It laughs at the self-importance of the ego. It holds compassion for all living things. It is most present when the mind is still, yet perceptive to the moment.

There is something beyond oneself. It is intelligent beyond comprehension. It had been called many names - Brahma, God, Evolution, Nature, the Universe, depending upon one's occupation and point of view. It is all those labels and more. It is nameless. It is sacred. It is kind, It is loving. It is the stuff of consciousness.

If the nameless is the ocean, then the I is a wave on that ocean. Both are conscious. Both are aspects of the same thing. Both are one, but what does that mean? At some point, words become meaningless. Experience and perception must override thoughts, speech and language. It's all been said, and yet the most meaningful, the most important attributes of being human are the unsaid, the nameless knowings.