Bull-ief Systems

Worth investigating at least because our beliefs could be the root of all—good, bad, and wrong.  Waking up is what is entailed here—a massive awakening to the idea that our beliefs have been systematically working for or against us and how we must tap into this in order to change or keep what we like.

From the minute we’re born, though we may not quite remember the minute nor the four years following, someone else’s beliefs were allotted to us.  Someone caring for you, believed it to be cold out and persuaded you of this, you in turn bought into this and wore the wool sweater to school while everyone else was still in tunics.    Someone else raising you would go to church every Sunday and drag innocent, sleeping people out of their beds to go to church with them—thus another belief instilled.

If you were raised in a jungle then you believed bananas were good and bear sounds were bad and that goats had no business in a jungle—just wrong.  If you were one of the few, the lucky and the proud to be brought up in the concrete jungle of a city then you believed that people get from point A to point B quicker by stressing and experiencing discomfort around the heart area mostly.

If we made it this far -now we’re all growd up– can we all agree that beliefs need re-examining at least.   That they’re are own to re-examine before we unwittingly pass on our less than fruitful and borderline poppycock, sometimes downright poppycock beliefs on to others, others more susceptible to believing all-  like two year olds and certain larva.

People believe what, ultimately, other people taught them to believe whilst still impressionable …until!  Until there is no excuses anymore and we wake up, usually by way of jolt, to our own answerability.  What stays and what seriously must go– comes down to what we decide to believe.

Pys(ide)-Kicks

In case one is not familiarized with what a Medium allegedly does, they are the in-betweeners of them and us, the departed and the living.  There’s only a handful of legitimate ones, normally not found on their way to a backstage greenroom of some pretentious TV show.   Who gave these guys  an operating permit?  I have a real problem with the latter, and falsely established version of “mediums”. Its not a goods or a service– it’s a farce.  I’m talking largely about the TV mediums and not about the few genuinely gifted ones –the same ones who don’t make a cent and who wouldn’t know the first thing on how to package and market this rarefied and strange endowment of theirs.

No, I mean the ones that bring their self-proclaimed psychic butts and, highly paid ones at that, to the Ricki Lake show and the like shows.  I knew I shouldn’t have gotten cable – I really wasn’t missing anything—why’d I go and do that fer???  So the psychic mediums come on the show and are introduced like this, “get ready to cry, people”… un hun…. Isn’t a show supposed to entertain?  They take things a little too far, these days, when entertainment feels it needs to cross realms to get ratings.  Besides, who’s the agent speaking on “the other sides’ behalf and have the appropriate peeps from both spheres met for lunch to discuss the contract?

Highfaluting and overly bubbly and blond, they bring their crazily audacious and how-do-they-sleep-at-night-in-the-dark  selves to the TV audience.  The same TV audience whose remote control is too far to get hold of and also who are just too transfixed by the bold clearance these self-appointed professionals of the other side –got leeway on.

We start crying too, I’ll be the first to admit.  It gets me every time the way the psychic takes a 50/50 shot and misses when the psychic asks an already shaken contestant, winner of an exploitation,  “you lost a mother, did you?…”No”, insists the quizzical audience member, still crying and who she’s pretty sure it was her father she lost.  Her mother is sitting right next to her and totally pinchable — as a live, admittance fee paid and all, audience member,  Yet now, and thanks to the oddly informed psychic, has something to worry about.

Its fun to watch the pseudo whisperers squirm out of the wrong 50 percent.  It makes for such good “bad TV” though.  Oh look, there’s my cable bill, wishing this, instead, was ghostly and not really here.

SPIRIT CURRENCY

They say you cannot take it with you when you go.  So where does it go? They’re meaning, of course, material and money.  What we feel we need so much of here to be able to live – there, however  is unheard of, even laughable.   So after inheritances are reckoned, expenses paid and people, loved ones go home, we ask –“what was that all about”?  The struggle, the attainment, the loss, the gain, the investment, the green, the gold, the orange– bills.

Besides my modest share, for we were not the Rockefellers… what my parents, now departed, have taught me about money is the real legacy of wealth they had bestowed upon me.   In fact, in their spirit way – they still provide for me.  All I need to do is recall what their relationship with money was –what to assimilate, what to refute.  What I absorbed when they didn’t think they were teaching, and what I picked up about money and the absence of it.

My father was a big fan of cash.  He worked too hard for it though, manual labor—break back and endless.   He gambled with the leftover, after mortgage, food, clothes, school for us.  After bills, house repairs, helping family and friends with loans. After, surgeries and family vacation fund and emergency fund were paid into.  Then, suddenly, he began wanting some of that back in the most urgent of ways.  The outlet– gambling guiltily half the time and regardless of guilt most of the time.  He passed away a few days before his retirement.  Never won much.

My mother saved every nickel and dime while babysitting her grandchildren.  My brothers and sisters paid her secretly at the end of a hard week of my mom raising their babies.  They paid her behind my fathers’ back or he was sure to grab some for his gambling.  By the end of it she had accrued thousands and my father had no dibs nor knowledge of it– zero.   She helped anyone in the family that would be facing financial challenge.  My mother without working a day outside her own house, was a tycoon, the go-to person, the feared and revered, they called her Mafia Mom.  Just kidding, my mom was lovely –and by then lovely and rich.

My big brother’s relationship to money was to not have one.  He passed away at the age of thirty-seven from an aneurism.  He didn’t take anything with him because he didn’t have any…at least none that you could see.  His money was figuratively folded within his ideas.  He was a budding film producer/director that Hollywood had already begun hearing good things about.  Equating to a lot of potential, equating to eventual and grand scale money.  But not before his unfortunate and untimely demise. Whatever money there was went to paying the employees of his newly thriving production company. The banks went hungry and so what –no harm done here.

But during his short lifetime no celebration went uncelebrated.  He spent his time looking for a reason to celebrate people and happy events in their lives,  Yes, with money sometimes but mostly with his kindness, more…his magnanimity.  Nobody that knew him or crossed paths with him went without feeling his/her own self-worth… priceless… and he was my big brother.  I’m already richer than I think.

Of course, we all need it and wouldn’t refuse it – that would be ludicrous.  However, what I have learned from my spirit guides and the best and free of charge financial advisors is that money isn’t everything. Its not what makes the world go ’round, it goes ’round due to the spinning axis its presently sitting on.  The Big Guy in the sky got the bill for that one.  Did any one think of sending Him a thank you card?!  Money doesn’t travel well to that other side, we can’t sneak it in don’t even try.   And lastly, to always remember and don’t ever forget to teach the value of kindness, light, easy,  free, good, angelic kindness.  In the words of  Sting himself, formerly known as The Police when he said it… “we are spirits of the material world” — pass it on!

Nonlinearity

Nice word to mean “confused”.   Getting to where we’re headed is half the battle once we know where we’re headed.  The other half is understanding that we may not get exactly there, nor exactly there on time.  There may be pit stops, detours and, at times at our most stubborn –the revisiting of a location.

Someone said, “we are exactly where we need to be in our lives right now in the present moment”.  The Beatles said the same thing a little differently while using melody when Mccartney sang “Long and Winding Road”, the one that leads to your door or the door of where we need to be at the time. The same long and winding road that the wild and windy night managed to remove all traces of – call it short term memory on our behalf.

Lessons need to be fully grasped before we can move on to another point.   Lessons don’t especially give a hoot where on the echelon we happen to be at, nor how speedily we want to get out of there.   Every single path we took to our destination and dreams, every fork in the road we stalled at and the length of time wasted there, every wrong turn, o.k.-but-not-quite-right-turn, oops! wrong door entirely as you turn the key—turn — all on purpose.

From point A to point B is nonsensical to nonlinearity.  Essentially, its simply asking us to embrace it and enjoy the ride askew,  stop and have coffee, maybe even take notes… stay awhile.  Forgiving ourselves if we’re not where we think we should be yet, because in all likelihood if we did it right—we’re not.  Also, whoever you had to meet is probably late as well, stuck on his/her own messed-up route to “there”. It happens–more than we plan on.

So you see, just relax and have a beer by optimistic and encouraging point five.  By-the-way, point six called and asked if you could go back to point three and get some wood to build a bridge with since seven eight(ate) nine and well… you’ll be needing it.   Get the point!

Mending Bad

I love, love, love the series Breaking Bad, so much so I’m hailing its praises in a second post to satiate my curiosity as to why it is that we root for Walter White the drug producer – a drug maker for crying out loud! Still, why do we love him?  My second question is, is he really breaking bad or is he systematically doing some mend work, in himself and in the fabric of our broken and falling apart society?   So lets’ enjoy TV instead –shall we, because we can.

I know nothing of drugs, and I’m boring that way.  Someone who never did drugs, don’t envision starting the costly and unsanitary hobby now in my really late thirties.  And, who can tell you that the closest  I ever got to drugs was possibly the time I inadvertently and by mistake brushed up against a drug addict while in the produce aisle ,at the supermarket, as we were going for the same bell shaped tomato. I really wanted to make a salad for supper that evening—the junkie declared the bell shaped tomato was Jesus.  Salad! Jesus! Salad, Big-Guy!– the produce clerk had to come and break it up—  We both walked away from that tomato, that day.   But that’s it– otherwise – I’m boring.  You see my dilemma and why I have to live vicariously through all episodes of Breaking Bad where Walter White’s main character lives out the most outrageous and completely deliberate plans to stay financially afloat in this ever-sinking economic world.  Drugs is only the secondary issue here.  Round these parts, drugs are just the conduit to Walter’s bad –which needs breaking then setting right.

This modest teacher, husband, father turned sick guy and good to no one without insurance has to protect his family somehow… bread winner/ bad breaker –same thing. What’s so bad about that—so far-nothing? Its just that what starts out as easy money while putting his chemists smarts into little plastic baggies and producing the much coveted white stuff (which may as well be icing sugar to me $2.99 for 15 kilos at Shaw’s this week—a lot of frosting!)..  overnight turns into “ hey, if I can make a hundred easy dollars – I can make a hundred thousand easy dollars.  And, well… everything is the matter with that –shocking, gross injustice and go-for-it-on-our-behalves-Walter, because lets be honest, who wouldn’t take this mission on while playing in Hollywoods’, backyard where there’s only Hollywood jail to contend to.

Walter, now sick guy, makes the leap from thinking of his family’s future through a little elicit and shady money making practice –you know to pay off the mortgage, college fund for the kiddies, nest-egg thinking—no one gets hurt.   To saving his family from angered and jaded feeling, scumbag drug lords(the real bad guys who deal drugs to get money, a little like Walt but different, and whose panties get wedged so far up their butts with sheer and poignant and ouchy –envy for Walt’s magic recipe.  They now want to kill his family, composed of a blond lady Nice n’ Easy #14, a handicapped teen and a wee little baby.   He has to protect them at any cost, at a hundred million dollar cost.  He can, he must, he will.  Ohhhhh! my drughero!   Now, he’s become so bad – he’s good at making us love him for it.

Why I root for Walter White is really telling about me – about us all if we root for him, and we should all be rooting for him –in unison.   But quietly, keeping it down to a low roar however, we don’t want neighbour Officer Joe O’Reily listening in on all the ‘happy’ going on in our apartment.  Shhhhh… I feel so vicariously bad and vindicated as I’m watching BB –that I want to  smoke my popcorn and inject the Pepsi I’m sipping or own and operate a really mini meth lab myself… kidding… about all those things, of course.  I’ll just sit here quietly, and revel in the powerplayer of the century- WW instead.  Walter is good guy who’s forced to do some bad, bad things. He’s at gunpoint when he does those bad, bad things—but he, himself  is pointing the gun to his head.  Drama!

Walt is living the American dream— awake.  Thus, converting the dream into biting realism or a really intensely and brilliantly scripted nightmare.   In fact, Breaking Bad is the meeting point at which the sleeping dream seizes and slapping reality stomps right in and directs the show from here.   In our own lives we’ve come to this particular juncture many-a-times ourselves in less lucrative ways.   We relate to Breaking Bad because its our own personal push reaching shove and how we deal – not drugs, but how we deal any which we know. Confronting and combatting our own demons using our natural resources to get through and hopefully make sense out of senseless.

Walter accomplishes this feat by making money out of someone else’s hardship but the hardship here is already and unfortunately a sinking ship.  And so Walter decides every time, as anyone would if we were asked to decide quick, that since there is only so much air time to repent and come clean, that there is no time to waste and off with his head while he fights the good fight and for the greater good who deserves a chance.  It’s a jungle out there, survival of the fittest becomes a mind game. Harsh, but we’re not watching Gilligan’s Island when watching Breaking Bad.  Although we could say its Vince Gilligans’ Island— creator of the show.

If you look up “Breaking Bad” in the dictionary, it ought to be in there by now, it means smooth.  I’m gonna do it, I am going to rate this series, because its my post so I can do what I want… I’m going to give Breaking Bad two unbroken and pretty  thumbs up.