Drinking the proverbial kool-aid

I love a good conspiracy theory.  I've been following them for years.  I've learned something that I call drinking the proverbial kool-aid.

'Drinking the kool-aid' goes back to the Jim Jones mass suicide where people drank the liquid laced with poison.  However, in my experience, anyone who buys into a theory so strongly, is doing exactly that.  They buy into a falsehood or a partial truth, as which all falsehoods are based, so much that it affects them in a negative manner.  I use the term proverbial, because it means that while you bought into it, it shouldn't have affected you to begin with.

With the Clinton v. Trump election, I can tell you that many people are experiencing this.  They've been experiencing it for months, and it may never ever go away.

So, the symptom of this is fear.  Now most fear is based in one's sense of mortality.  Fear can be helpful in this regard, because it gives us a sense of caution.  However, that's not the fear that I am talking about.

Instead it's a fear that things are going to be so wrong, that the world will be drastically changed forever and ruin whatever life you think you are living.  Unfortunately, this fear is a rather irrational one.  It's only purpose is to blind you from your perspective and your ability to see beyond the trivial.

In simpler terms, you have been fed a lie.  A lie that's designed to make you think in a certain direction and to experience an emotion that is baseless in regards to actual fact.

In many years of conspiracy theory, I drank the kool-aid many times.  It was only by separating myself from all of the information that the irrational thoughts and impending doom would eventually dissipate.

So let's look at the facts here.  Most people voted against things like hatred, racism, elitism, and sexism.  However, this is where the problem begins, because the information about those things changed depending on the source of the information, and those sources made it their job to force those items into their spotlights.  It got to the point where each candidate was blaming the sources where this came from.  You could call these two sources The Mainstream Media and the Alt Right, but this oversimplifies the issue.

To be properly objective, you have to cultivate information from multiple/many sources and have backing information to go with those sources.  You have to be able to acknowledge where the information came from and what it is saying.  To not take these things into consideration or to only cultivate from a single source is exactly what causes the proverbial kool-aid to take hold of you.

To say this is the first time that the masses have drank the proverbial kool-aid would be a lie.  We just experienced this in 2008 when many gun owners were in perpetual fear of the removal of the 2nd amendment and the rise of the police state underneath martial law.

Were the people wrong about it?  Well 8 years later and only 2 months left of the current administration, it appears to not be true.  "Yes, it's different this time", but yet, the fact that you drank the proverbial kool-aid remains the same.

If you are in fear, it's because you bought into the idea that things are just going to end up horribly and nothing will ever be the same.  But reality shows that there are themes that replicate in all parts of life.  Things change, some changes happen, but many remain the same.  We resist change, and that's understandable, but we do so out of the rational fears that we have.

We also know this.  Sometimes we lose, but other times we win.  Things usually work out in the end.

So, you must always look into your fears.  Why you have those fears is so important.  If you find that your fear is based in something that may be irrational, you must step back and reassess the current moment you are in.  Look to what is good in your life and work on that for awhile, and then come back to that fear you were having.  Chances are, that fear is gone and replaced with something else.  Hopefully it's found as a newfound strength, because when we confront our fears we should always find ourselves becoming stronger.

Whoever won this election really didn't matter in the biggest picture.  Each had their soul crushing flaws (sorry, but the real truth is they ALL had them), but unless you haven't paid attention to history or civics, you should know that things have a way of balancing themselves out.  That fear from the proverbial kool-aid will always be there, but until you realize that, it is nothing more than the irrational, feeding it.

It is like a cornered animal that gets aggressive and lashes back.  The best way to deal with this is to step back and move away from it.  Otherwise, it will still be there.

I trust that all things balance out, always.  It's the nature of the universe.  It's embodied in a term called entropy.  It's where I found the rational perspective.  It's why I can say that no matter what happens, things are going to be okay.

Unless you drank the proverbial kool-aid.

Why we should not be praying for peace.

Prayer is one of those things where I know most people do it incorrectly.  In prayer, you must realize that the resonance of key words is what determines outcomes.  It's as if you are looking at weight loss, when the key is weight, which means you resonate with weight.  It is as if you pray for someone with cancer, and their cancer gets worse.  In those cases you should be praying for health and fitness.

So in a recent episode of Game of Thrones, Tyrion Lannister made a statement about how you don't make peace with your friends, but rather with your enemies.

If we are to understand the resonance of peace, that means that we consider other people to be our enemies.  In other words, to pray for peace would mean that you pray for enemies.

Pray for friendship, pray for togetherness, or even pray for cooperation.  Just don't pray for peace.

The hippies got it wrong.

The happiness project

It started out as just an idea.  I was not happy with where I was working, what I was doing and a bunch of little things that made my job unbearable and I was looking to find a new job at that point.  However, life has a funny way of pointing things out to you that supposed to kick you into responding in a certain way.  It was when I took up the challenge for me to figure it out that I came up with an idea.

That idea was: What will it take for me to be happy?

Now it's a struggle for most of my life to understand it.  People would appear to change in their life that created this almost insane like happiness and I didn't understand the source of it.  In college, it was people converting to Christianity that when they did so, they were amazingly changed for the better.  However, my upbringing had me accepting it at a very young age.  I was missing some big moment.

A couple of months ago, I decided to actually do something about it.  That's when I remembered something that I have learned in the past 4 years.  That truth is that ALL things proceed as a result of choice.

So phase 1 was this:  What if I just chose to be happy?

So I started to run with it.  Startlingly, this works really, really well!  Instead of this gloomy work environment where people are just phoning in their work from day to day, the interactions started to improve.  I started to really enjoy what I was doing.  To top it off, someone said to me, this place just ain't the same when you aren't around.  They wanted me to be there, because work is so much more enjoyable.

I told the heads of the company about this, and they liked the idea.  They started applying it to their own lives.  Things continued to improve.

However, life is not without a sense of irony and things started to turn.  When life gets negative or chaotic, the problem exists and resolves by how you react to it.  If you choose to let it get to you, it festers and becomes worse and worse.  However, if you rise above the challenge, then you may find yourself in a much better place.  So, how do you handle it?

Phase 2:  Learn to laugh at the ridiculous.

So lately things were taking a turn and just driving my energy back to the ground and it wasn't just one thing, it was a lot of little things.  Those little things are going to drag you around like you're Gulliver on the island of Lilliput.  Eventually they are going to take over and once they do, you're trapped.

Now I like horror films, but not for the incessant need for violence or disturbing images.  Actually it's because all horror films are based out of a comedic concept.  And depending on how you view that concept determines whether you are scared or purely and happily entertained.  I was watching "The Cabin In The Woods" and there's a scene that is hilariously funny, which occurs in the film.  The scene plays like this:  The characters are all being picked off one by one, and stumble onto this elevator that takes them into this structure where every possible cataclysm is stored.  Once inside the facility they barricade themselves in a control room.  As they are approached by the building security, they find a button that says "Purge" and they press it.  What happens next is that several elevator doors open and different creatures jump out and proceed to disembowel and eviscerate the security team.  Another security team shows up to help, and then the elevators open again with even more creatures.

To me this is a hilarious moment in the film!  But it was pointing me to the fact that when things are just really serious and it's becoming almost combative in conflicts, the one thing we must remember is that it's actually really funny.

It's like what Metatron says in the movie dogma when Bethany asks what's God like.  "God?  Lonely.  But funny.  He's got a great sense of humor.  Take sex for example.  There's nothing funnier than the ridiculous faces you people make mid-coitus."  To which Bethany replies, "Sex is a joke in heaven?" Then Metatron says, "The way I understand it, it's mostly a joke down here, too."

So as my happiness project enters phase 2, I thought it would be a good time to let people know what I have been up to and give them something to work on.  If I have learned anything over the years, it is that reality is shaped by how you perceive it.  Nothing else.  You choose to live in a way that makes you happy or not.  The people around you, if you consider that they are part of your mind, then a simple thing as changing your mind has the potential to make their lives better.

Choose happiness, learn to laugh at everything.  See how that works for you.

What is wrong with political candidates? How do we get to "YES"?

In this recent election process for the president of the United States, there is a lot of anger, and frustration with the people put into the spotlight of candidacy.  A lot of solutions are presented, but they are not without their sense of control or entitlements, especially from the candidates themselves.

While I do not want to mention any of the names, the problems faced by the United States can be solved, but only by those willing to make a strong statement that says that they can solve them.  I am not wholly convinced this is possible with the current selection.

So here's what I would say if I was running a campaign for president.  Which I need to state on the record is something a normal person (especially myself) should not want.

First is that I would state that every decision that I would make would need to answer the following:  How do we get to "YES"?

Jobs and Immigration are key points to be made, because we are so possessive of the fragile state of employment.  We take what we can, in order to make enough to get by.  But what if that wasn't an issue?  What if we take this ball and run it as far as it can go.  First we must understand that some jobs that exist probably shouldn't be in existence anymore.  It's as if we fund things like the pony express when we have a currently functioning postal system.  What we should strive for as a nation is to create an environment that has more and more jobs than there are people.  We should make it clear that in order to be an employer here, that you should have citizens working for you and that those that aren't should want to become a proper citizen.

Next we should look at the impending problems dealing with healthcare.  What has been given to the public is a farce at best and an insult at its worst.  When I talk about jobs not being needed, what part of health requires insurance?  Is insurance the solution to worsening health problems?  No, that would be science and medicine.  We fail this nation, when we fail to realize the problem is not in the solution but in the source of the problem itself.  When we throw money at an issue, or in some cases medicine, we don't realize the source of the problem.  We look at the conditions and then try to treat the condition, while ignoring the source of the problem.  While our elected leaders fail to recognize this time and time again, we are faced with the ever impending gloom that the source of our problems are not being addressed.

That goes without saying that it applies to all areas of this country.

As far as this country goes, the way we have been handling issues also applies to where we have picked our battle grounds.  We chose to wage a war on things we don't understand, drugs, terrorism, and even the frustrations of the inner city.  Instead of addressing the source of the issues, we have opted quite badly to treat the conditions.  In medical terms it would be like saying that the best solution to a fever is a topical cooling ointment because that will lower the temperature.  It's insane to make those kinds of statements, because we fail everyone when we don't treat the underlying cause.

We decided to incriminate many of the inner city, because of the violence that exists, but where does that come from.  I don't have a solution for this, because I don't understand the mindset that propels someone to resort to this measure, but if the issue is that people have become distraught because of worsening employment, wouldn't the answer be to foster the addition of more and more jobs?  It's a literal question of what would need to exist for people to become happy to be doing a job?

Now the drug war is something that was spawned in the past century, but this war fails us on so many levels.  You have tunnels dug underneath the border to this country, you have war torn Afghanistan being the growing fields for opium, and you have a policy that closely resembles the prohibition laws of years ago.  Those things don't work.  Instead they cause worse things to happen.

Take an example of marijuana.  In most of the nation and in the federal view, this substance is considered as bad as any other illegal drug on the market.  Some people even claim that this substance is a gateway to other drugs.  The real problem with it is this.  When you take something away that instead of giving the people the option of deciding its dangers, what you leave in its place is a vacuum of sorts, that fosters the sort of options that are even worse than the original problem.  Where else would crystal meth have come from?  What about heroin?

People are looking for ways to have to deal with some of the pain that is a part of life on this planet.  When the prohibition laws were made, people resorted to making alcohol for themselves, which gave rise to the underground moonshiners.  But here's the thing we should take from that:  We need to acknowledge that when we just take something away, we don't look at the reason for why it is still there. Nor do we realize that something must take its place.

Which leads me to the elephant in America.  It's guns.  We have so much fear and pain, that we desperately hold onto whatever can keep us from losing our minds altogether.  The solution is to not restrict guns, but to figure out how we can make it so that if you have a gun, you'll never need to have it on you.  It's part trust, which is readily apparent that our representative law makers do not have in the people.  It come down to a really simple question, why do we lock our doors?  We need to get to a point where you can hand someone a gun and their reply should be "I don't need this."

There is more good in this country than we can know, but unless we learn that protesting, violence, thievery, or even hatred toward one another is not the solution, then we can get to the part that we know we can disagree but move forward.  We can then change a punch to a face into a handshake or a hug.  We can assist others when they are in need.  We truly need to understand one another.  We can be a country that not only says it's a great country, but one that people acknowledge IS a really great country.

So, how do we get to say "YES", so that this country can be better?

How do we take it to another level, to say this whole world can be better?