Trying Linux as Alternative to Windows 11

Here's my new POP OS desktop: 

 

So, I finally took the plunge and installed Linux as my primary operating system. 

I've used Linux before, but only as a preview, on USB stick, just to check it out. And I only kept Windows all these years because my previous job required it, and figured most work from home remote job opportunities would require it, but I'm learning about virtual machines, and figuring out how to use Linux as my primary OS, and Windows in a virtual machine as needed. 

I went with Pop OS, because I have a computer with NVIDIA graphics card, and wanted to still be able to play games on STEAM, which these days mostly means "The Long Dark", although honestly, I really don't have much time to play games anymore, but I wanted to keep the option available. I'm kind of a LInux beginner, so for now I use POP OS, but eventually as I learn more about it I may change to something else. In my alternate life I was a computer hacker, and Kali (Yoga) was my preferred platform. 

Anyway, one of the first programs I reinstalled was Calibre, which is a program that converts ebooks into different file formats, such as PDF to Kindle. I have at least a thousand ebooks stored in a variety of formats, but will likely never be able to read them all, only because I keep finding new books that take precedence. So I'm starting over with a fresh installation, and if the book is meant to be read it will be read. 

These are the first three books I downloaded: 

1) The Transhumanism Pandemic: Sub-Humanity's Messiah, Humanity's Annihilation 

Comment: Interesting book. Unfortunately it's not listed on Goodreads, so if I read it, you'll likely get a new entry on Unlisted Books. 

2)  Flow My Tears the Policeman Said

Comment: I recently stumbled upon a Philip K Dick documentary on YouTube that referenced this, and it seemed really interesting. It actually showed footage of Philip K Dick being interviewed about his thought process, what was going on in his life at the time that lead to writing this book. It was really weird, and very interesting, involving parallel dimensions and alternate timelines and government conspiracies of cosmic proportions. If I read this there will likely be a follow up post about it.  

3) The Kolbrin Bible

Comment: Another niche topic. Could it be the lost Teachings of Jesus Christ, or science fiction invented by a 1970s American cult propagating propaganda to ensnare new recruits? I'm very much an astute observer of anything involving cults and conspiracy theories and forbidden history, so this is right up my alley. 

 

Zika head

So, I finally finished reading Journeys Out of the Body by Robert Monroe.  It's triggered all sorts of memories. Like when I was in high school, I was really into reading about lucid dreaming and out of body experiences, because I've always had vivid dreams, and still to this day remember dreams I had in my childhood forty years ago.

At one point I actually considered attending the Esalen Institute. Glad I didn't though, because it's a fucking cult, and a recruitment channel into other nefarious activities, much like the Freemasons and the Church of Scientology. 

Anyway,  as a child I had dreams of flying, dreams of jumping with legs like rubber bands, dreams of floating up into outer space and viewing the constellations up close. Yeah, I've probably been traveling outside of my body for most of my life. 

The point I'd like to highlight though is a part of the book toward the end when the author talked about experimenting with inhalants, such as ether and nitrious oxide, used in the context of facilitating out of body experiences. He mentioned an example of people being employed on gasoline tanker ships, who became addicted to getting high off the fumes. Much like winos, they'd be found passed out next to the gasoline storage tanks after a long night of huffing. I had never heard of that before. It never occurred to me that some people employed in certain industries where they are exposed to toxic chemicals, may actually be enjoying the experience, and are there specifically for it, where they perceive it as a job perk, even though it's causing irreversible brain damage and killing most of them prematurely with cancer.

It reminded me of where I live, where currently all of the maintenance men are Hispanic, and English is not their first language. The painters, the carpet layers, the landscapers, and the people who resurfaced the tennis court, none of them in all the years I've lived here has ever visibly worn any personal protective gear, such as respirator, ear plugs, eye protection, etc., when dealing with volatile chemicals, toxic fumes, paints, solvents, etc.. 

And when I first noticed it, I was like these people are fucking dumb. Dumb Mexicans. They're retarded zikaheads. But then I thought maybe they are exploited. You know hired for the job but never warned about its dangers. If they were given the accurate information, surely they'd care, and do the right thing.

Well, that might be true for some, but unfortunately around here is not true for most. I'm finding that many of them actually like breathing in the fumes, and it's probably the highlight of their day. The landscapers running leaf blowers for hours at a time, not because they are actually doing anything useful, and not because they are just going through motions of working, but actually they are intentionally getting high off the fumes.

For example, I've seen the maintenance man repeatedly painting the same flag pole, not because it needs to be done, not because he is just killing time at the end of his shift, but because he's getting high off the fumes. There's no other explanation. I've seen it in their eyes. The forever smile, the eyes that always sparkle. You ask them a question requiring reasoning, and they just laugh, and act like it's something that only they know,  and is outside your understanding. Those are the eyes of the Mexican man addicted to huffing solvents and paint.

The Mexicans resurfacing the tennis court where I live, I watched them near the end, lying directly on the court, literally lying on their backs, laughing and smiling like little boys, even though they were probably in their 20s or 30s, high out of their minds off of the volatile chemicals. And it's something they do on a daily basis. I wonder how many IQ points drop per year of doing that? No wonder Mexicans have a reputation for being lazy and stupid, if anyone of any race huffed enough toxic fumes you'd be a brain damaged Zika head too.

Journeys Out of the Body

So, I started reading this book that's been on my radar for a few years now, about astral travel and out of body experiences. It's called "Journeys Out of the Body" by Robert A. Malone. 

Its primary thesis is that every living human being, besides having a physical body, also has a second non-material body, existing in the ethereal dimension of dreams. When you go to sleep, sometimes you are not just dreaming, you are actually traveling to real places in your sleep. Meaning, it's not imaginary, but is quite real. Except that when you travel this way you're like a ghost, and most people can't see you, but at the same time you might also see and interact with dead people, and with non-human entities as well. Also, when you go to sleep and travel outside of your body, you may travel to other planets and other dimensions, and may even travel backwards and forwards in time.

Reading this book reminded me of myself as a teenager in the 1990s, and how at the time I was obsessed with supernatural phenomena, ESP, time travel, parallel universes, the quest for immortality, and the ascension into higher realms and higher states of consciousness. I remember being 14 years old and discovering the authors Hermann Hesse and Carlos Castaneda, and the subjects of astral projection, lucid dreaming, and shamanism.

I haven't really thought about it for awhile, but there was a time in my youth in which I was a serious seeker. But somehow the responsibilities of adulthood have caused me to forget. Anyway, I'm reading this book, which narrates events that happened in my grandparents era, that of the 1940s to 1960s, about a man documenting the process of experimenting with astral travel to other dimensions in time and space. 

I woke up this morning too early. Like I'd been asleep for less than four hours, but I couldn't get back to sleep, so I read my book for a few minutes, and then shortly later went back to sleep, in which I dreamt of speaking face to face with an elderly white bald man without eyes, but having scars where the eyes should be, and all that existed to see was a small red slot over a scarred eye socket in which I stared intently into. I communicated with this man briefly, in which he told me that he knew the secrets for traveling to other worlds, and asked if I was there to learn them. 

I woke up, having no memory of anything else, but I think it will be something that I will explore further.

Health and Light

 

So, apparently Trump has signed an Executive Order making incandescent light bulbs legal again. 

This is great! I won't go into the specifics of why this is great, other than simply stating that incandescent light bulbs are significantly healthier than LED computer chip based light bulbs, but this video I'm posting a link to below does a great job in explaining why. 

It's a great channel. This guy is my new teacher, and I will be studying his videos, and reading every single book he recommends. 

(Update: November 15, 2025. This guy has been an inspiration. Thank you kindly for the good quality book recommendations, and the helpful  insights about the healing power of the sun and the adverse health effects from LED lights, but I can not in good conscience recommend this guy anymore. Anyone who says that parasites are good and raw meat is healthy is not someone I could ever support.)

Based on his recommendation I'm going to start taking iodine supplements ( I hear Lugols is good). I'm going to buy some incandescent light bulbs, because I honestly didn't even know they were legalized again before I watched this video, and I'm going to get rid of my LED lamps, and go back to incandescent.

Video credit: Cultivate Elevate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozInNWf0cD0

Also: I discovered this channel via https://xcancel.com/RedpillDrifter

Book credit:  Health and Light: The extraordinary Study that Shows How light Affects Your Health and emotional well being. Author: John Nash Ott. 

Description: "The story of John Ott's discovery of the role light plays in sustaining physical health is one of the true scientific breakthroughs of the last half century. It is the story of an observant, intelligent man who acted upon his observations and then supported them with scientific exploration. Health and Light has led many people to a greater understanding of the subtle role light plays in maintaining physical and emotional health."

Thank you so much. 

Bringers of the Dawn

I just started reading a new book Bringers of the Dawn: Teachings of the Pleiadians. It's from the early 1990s. I don't too often read New Age type books anymore, but it had been on my to read list for many years now, and so I needed something "light" to take my mind off the very dark subject matter I've been reading as of late. 

Anyway, I only just started reading it, so this post isn't really about that book, but just to write about a memory that this book triggered. 

You see I have an old friend from high school who has the same last name as the author of that book, and I have this vague memory that they may have been related. Anyway, it made me think of him, and so I decided to look him up. Well, I Googled him, and I found out that he died a few years ago, at the age of 39. The obituary did not indicate how he died, but after a little bit of digging I found out that he actually died while in police custody, supposedly by suicide, specifically by hanging with a sock. Is that even possible? Of course, the first thing I thought was that he was murdered, ala Epstein, John MacAfee style. 

It's very strange, because there turned out to be a federal court case about his death, where his family sued the police department for wrongful death. I'm not going to get into all the specifics, but it read like an Alfred Hitchcock mystery thriller. 

What do we know about the man? 

Well, he had an association with Waldorf education, with Outward Bound, and with working for many years as a waiter at a variety of high end restaurants across the country, from Las Vegas to LA, from Chicago to NYC. He was also a gay man, though really bisexual, because he had been married to a woman once, and fathered a son, but for a greater part of his life, he identified as a gay man, and at the time of his death he was living with a man, who presumably was his lover. Now what's really odd about it is that what attracted the attention of the police in the first place, was that on the night of my friend's death, his roommate apparently fell out of the window of their shared fourth story apartment in the middle of the night. Of course, the first thought that crossed my mind was, did he jump, or was he pushed? Well, apparently he says he fell, and I guess he survived. Well, the police did a welfare check on that apartment, and had to break the door down, and found my friend lying naked face down on the bed, with broken glass and blood everywhere. 

Apparently the police recognized the man, because they had just been to the apartment a week before, where he had overdosed on heroin. Apparently he had a long history of mental illness, specifically bi-polar disorder, and substance abuse, and had tried to commit suicide before. 

Let's back up a bit. 

My memory of him from high school is that he was a really smart, good looking guy, easy to talk to, and I liked him. He had very strong emotional intelligence, could strike up a conversation with anyone, and seemed wise beyond his years. Of course, this is my assessment at age 16, so maybe I wasn't necessarily the best judge of character, but that is what I remember. He wasn't a close friend necessarily, but we associated with the same circle of friends, and I had been to his home before, and met his mother, and I knew at the time that he was into using a lot of psychedelics, magic mushroom, LSD, and that he knew a lot about aliens, and reptilians, and you know, David Icke type stuff. 

It's weird because he was like the poster child for gay rights in the 1990s. He was like literally on posters in my school, because he was openly gay in high school, when I guess that was a new thing to be, and so they used him as a mascot for gay rights, for promoting the message that it's okay to be gay. But of course they didn't tell the truth back then, just like they don't tell the truth right now, that gay people, especially gay men, have a higher mortality rate than heterosexuals, and that the majority of gay men don't live to see their 50th birthday, because they either die from suicide, drug overdose, sexually transmitted diseases, or murder. 

This is actually the truth. That statistically speaking, being gay, as well as being transgender, is actually associated with premature death, as well as increased incidence of mental illness, mood disorders, and overall unhappiness, and should not by any means be promoted or encouraged, unless of course your objective is to kill, to harm, or to psychologically make worse. 

Now, let's imagine a map of the United States, with a circle encompassing the region of Chicago, Illinois and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. That's where I'm from. It's a fucking moral cesspool, an illuminati stronghold, with a strong masonic presence, and I'm very happy to have escaped.

Oh, I'm sure there is much more to this story, most likely involving pornography and pedophilia and prostitution and corrupt lawyers and judges and politicians and freemasons and satanists and other seedy characters that have turned to the dark side, and have thus lost their humanity.

I don't know what was going on with my friend, but I think he was probably a victim of abuse at some point in his life, and I guess he was just fulfilling his destiny. 

Moral lesson: Don't use drugs, and don't be gay, especially if you are a man. If you can do that, well congratulations, you've probably just extended your lifespan by at least 30 years. 

My Reading and Fitness Goals for 2023

The year is coming to a close and this will probably be the last time I post this year. So thought I would give a few updates concerning my goals for the new year. 

As always, two of the biggest priorities in my life have been maintaining good physical fitness, which means exercising consistently, and maintaining my steadfast devotion to lifelong learning, which means reading a lot of books. 

Since the beginning of the pandemic, and working full-time from home for almost two and a half years now, I've been staying home a lot more and also reading a lot more, but at the same time I've definitely gotten slightly out of shape. This is probably because for years I've commuted year round on my bicycle, riding to and from work every single day, rain or shine, riding at least 50 miles a week for years. So just riding to and from work, gave me my 30 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise a day. But working from home it all stopped. I only road my bike maybe once or twice a week to run errands on my days off, and so even though I did some exercise, it wasn't nearly as much as before.

It's possible I had a bad case of Covid last year, because I had to stop exercising completely for a few months because I had an abnormally rapid heartbeat, difficulty swallowing, and shortness of breath. Was really sick for a week, lost ten pounds, when I was already borderline underweight, and thought I was going to die, where I could barely walk to the mailbox without my heart rate maxing out. Well, a year later, I feel healthier than ever, and determined to get not only back into shape, but to get into the best shape of my life.

Fitness

Ok, so I've always been naturally athletic, even as a kid I was usually one of the first kids picked in gym class, and so it is fair to say that I've rarely ever not been in shape. I never really had to work hard to get into shape, it just came effortlessly to me, but the difference this time is that instead of just maintaining my fitness, it is now my goal to take my fitness to a new level, to become significantly stronger than ever before. This will be done primarily with calisthenics: pushups, pullups, crunches, dips, squats, and burpees, along with running and longboarding.

My fitness routine will be more focused with specific goals that are more challenging. Before, I used to work out just enough to maintain a decent level of fitness, but without actually getting any stronger. Well, now, I decided I need to get stronger, my upper body strength sucks! I've been neglecting my chest and abs for years and it is finally time I do something about it. 

Like, for instance, this month I've been doing 100 pushups everyday. When I first started I could barely do one pushup, now I can do 10 perfect form pushups, and 20 not so perfect. Doing 100 pushups is actually easier than I thought it would be. You just break it up into sets, and space it out throughout the day. I've been doing it everyday, even though I was under the belief that it is not good to do pushups everyday, but guess what, it's okay to do so for at least a short-term basis without hurting yourself. It was really about getting into a routine and building up discipline, and in this short time, I feel noticeably stronger. I thought about doing a before and after picture of myself, but then I realized I usually regret posting pictures of myself, so it's not necessary, but I will say that there is an improvement, my shoulders are more pronounced, my chest is slightly wider, my belly flab is not quite as pronounced. It's a small improvement but it's noticeable. And that's just in a month, maybe in a year I will look like an Olympian. 

One thing I will add is that I found it best to do regular pushups, as opposed to wall pushups, or knee pushups, aka "girl pushups", and if you can't do a perfect form pushup, then you just don't go down all the way, I call them mini-pushups, and you will gain strength, and as time goes by your form will improve and you will be able to go down all the way within a few weeks.

The month of December I've been focusing almost exclusively on doing pushups, but for January, instead of doing pushups everyday, I'm going to only do pushups four days a week, but increase the reps, from 100 to maybe 150, which will probably be 50 in the morning, 50 in the afternoon, and 50 at night, with added rest days, and additional challenges, like 100 triceps dips, 100 crunches, 100 squats, etc. 

So the focus will be in getting stronger with measurable documentation of progress. 

Reading

As far as reading, I will continue consistently reading, but with the added difference of it being more focused reading, picking a subject and reading several books on the subject, before moving on to another subject. 

In the past, even though I was an avid reader, you could also say that I had scattered reading habits. Back in the days before I had a Kindle, and when I was on a more frugal budget, most of the books I read were whatever I happened to stumble upon at the public library that caught my eye. So I was all over the place. Which is fine to some degree, it's good to diversify your reading, to read widely, both fiction and non-fiction, to become knowledgeable on many subjects. But the thing is that if you really want to achieve mastery of something you need to learn a lot about it, which means reading many books on whatever subject you want to master. Whereas if you read 20 books, all on different subjects, while you may know a little bit on many subjects, you won't really know a lot about one subject. 

So that's the difference now, I'm trying to become more focused in my reading habits. To read many books on one subject, before moving on to another subject, unless of course I discover the subject to be excruciatingly boring, in which case it's best to move on. And now that I have an ebook reader, I have access to more books than ever before, and can pretty much read anything I want to either for free, or at a major discounted price compared to the hard copy version. 

***

Currently I'm interested in learning about the Jews and the State of Israel. And so probably the next twenty books or so I read will be on that subject. And no, I am not an anti-Semite, even though some of the books I read may be interpreted by some to fall into that category. Even if I were Jewish, and I learned that there are books written that accuse the Jews of having committed great acts of evil, I would want to know about it, to find out if it's true, because I am interested in knowing the truth, no matter how unpleasant or disturbing it may be. 

Are Jews not interested in knowing the truth, if it makes them look bad as a people? That seems to be the case in my experience. It almost seems like the word anti-Semite is a word used to shut people up, and to avoid facing a disturbing issue that they don't want people to think about or to know about, even though it is true. Because that is I think the real issue at hand, is it true, is it anti-Semitic if it's true, is it not true simply because it could be interpreted as being anti-Semitic? 

That seems really dumb, or a form of Orwellian doublespeak. 

And if it's true, why would a Jew not want to know about it, and do something about it, to speak out against it, if what is spoken of is evil, and morally wrong? When a person says something offensive about the Jews, why do all Jews take offense, and consider it a personal attack? 

You know, I'm white, if you point out evil things committed by white people, I don't feel offended by it, because you know, it wasn't me. Same thing for my nationality, I'm American, if people in other countries criticize America, I don't feel personally offended by it, especially since most people that criticize America, are talking more about the military, big corporations, and politics, not the average person on the street.  But the Jews are different. If a person commits a crime, or does something terribly evil, and you mention that they are a Jew, and you notice a pattern, of many Jews being involved in it, such as Ponzi schemes, pornography, price gouging, and usury, suddenly you'd think you've waged war on them all, when that is clearly not what you said or what you meant. 

So, anyway, I find this topic extremely fascinating, and it is currently what I am reading about. Other topics I plan to read about are transhumanism, transgenderism, and the ways that humans are being intentionally dumbed down and poisoned by people who may or may not be in a certain cult that goes by a name that begins with the letter J. 

Some Thoughts on Free Speech

Free speech is under attack in America. I feel like I'm living in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Where up is down and down is up and thought crime is rapidly becoming a reality. 

Since when is it a crime to speak the truth, if the truth is offensive to someone?

Since when is it a crime to voice the opinion that white lives matter? 

Well, since now, apparently. According to the ADL, "White lives matter" is now classified as hate speech and associated with white supremacy. 

But it's okay to say "black lives matter" and it won't be associated with black supremacy, even if a black power activist who truly hates white people says it. 

That's really strange. It's almost like by censoring "white lives matter" they are communicating the message that "white lives DON'T matter."

So basically white people are bad, everybody else is good. 

What else can't you say? You can't say anything against transgenderism. 

What else? You can't speak out against the Covid-19 vaccine, and if you do, and you work in the medical field, you risk being fired, or losing your license to practice medicine. But if you are just a regular person who doesn't work in the medical field and you know someone who was damaged by the vaccine, or maybe you yourself experienced an adverse side effect from the vaccine, and maybe you're permanently disabled by it, and so you post about your experience on Twitter, and maybe if your post attracts enough attention, you get labeled a kook, a "crazy" anti-vaxer, a "dangerous misinformation super spreader", and the result is you get your account terminated. 

Anything else you can't talk about? Well, I'm sure there's a bunch of other stuff, but the biggest sacred cow of all, the one taboo that you are absolutely not allowed to talk about, to post about publicly, is to say anything critical of the Jewish people, to say anything that could even remotely be considered anti-Semitic. And you don't even have to actually say it yourself, all you have to do is link to a movie, a book, or article with anti-Semitic ideas, without the added disclaimer that it is evil and you don't approve of it, and that's enough to get your account terminated. 

This is what recently happened to musician Kanye West, and NBA basketball player Kyrie Irving. 

1) All Kanye West did was a) he wore a "white lives matter" t-shirt in public and b) he made a negative remark about the Jews dominating the music industry, suggesting that he'd been screwed over one too many times by the Jews. Okay, that's not verbatim, but that's the general idea. Now as a result of those two actions he's losing big time sponsorships, estimated to be around a billion dollars loss of income. He also had his Twitter page suspended, but has since been reinstated. 

2) All Kyri Irving did was share a link on his Twitter page to a movie, that some consider to be anti-Semitic. That's it, and for that "horrible" crime of exercising his freedom of speech, to link to a movie he liked, he's labeled an anti-Semite, even though he says he's definitely not an anti-Semite, because he's Semitic himself, and he's been suspended from playing NBA basketball for the Brooklyn Nets, and fined $500,000, and has to publicly apologize to a bunch of Jewish organizations. I guess he's supposed to get down and kiss the heels of their boots, begging for forgiveness, to show his masters that he will be a good obedient boy from now on, and will never post anything anti-Semitic again, or else it will be the end of his career. 

By the way, the name of the movie is "Hebrews to Negroes: Wake up Black America". It's based on a book. I'm anticipating it will be banned soon, so out of extreme curiosity, and not wanting to miss an opportunity to read a good banned book, I quickly purchased a copy yesterday, and it will be the next book I read. I'll try to do a follow up post once I do. 

I'm not a fan of Kanye West, by any means, I'm not a fan of his music or any of the crazy Kardashian drama, and not really being a basketball fan, I never even heard of the other guy before this, but they should have the freedom, at least when they are off the company clock so to speak, and in their own spare time, to think whatever they want, to wear whatever they want, and to express opinions that others may find offensive whenever they want. And if they don't, that leads us to the next conclusion, that the price they pay for their fame and fortune is to give up their freedom of speech. 

I mean it's not like they committed an actual crime, or incited a riot, or advocated the use of violence against anyone, so what they said should not have warranted the kind of response they got, in my opinion. 

But I guess they didn't get the memo when they got the job, that there are certain things they are not allowed to say even though it is not illegal to say them. Being that they are celebrities, whose bosses are either primarily Jewish, or who are beholden to Jewish financial interests, they crossed a line that they didn't know they weren't allowed to cross. 

Apparently what they didn't know is that all of their fame and fortune comes from wealthy Jews, and they are really nothing more than well paid mascots for the sports and entertainment industry, who are rewarded well for their obedience, and punished harshly for their failure to toe the line, but ultimately by giving up their freedom to say what they really think, without fear of losing everything, they have unwittingly become slaves, and didn't even know it.                             

Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon

I just finished reading the book Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream. I don't do book reviews. What I do instead is give the book a rating, on the scale of one to five, and then make a few comments about it. It's the lazy way, but it works for me. 

Anyway, I gave this book 2.5 stars. It wasn't a bad book, but it felt rushed and incomplete, like the author tried to fit in too much information, without really connecting the information in a meaningful way. It's like he took all his research notes and tried to squeeze them all into this book 'as is' without telling an engaging story. Ultimately this book raised more questions than it answered and left me with a feeling of complete information overload, but I did learn a few things. 

Basically, the idea is that 1) Laurel Canyon, and by extension Sunset Blvd, was the birthplace of the hippies. 2) That most of the countercultural rock stars that settled there in the 1960s had family connections to military intelligence. There's too many names to list, but a few examples include Jim Morrison, David Crosby,  and Frank Zappa. And 3) there was a classified military intelligence facility located in Laurel Canyon, with a fully operational movie studio, which was not made public until modern times. 4) With the hippies, and the birth of psychedelic rock, came the consumption and widespread promotion of psychedelic drugs. There was heavy drug use, promiscuity, and exploration of the occult. To cater to the drug fueled hippies, a drug trafficking industry was born, and with it came prostitution and pornography, and the emergence of hippie communes and satanic cults. 

The main theory of this book I think is that the whole drug fueled hippie countercultural phenomena was a PsyOp. It did not happen naturally, but was socially engineered. That there was an agenda, and the hippies were actors in a story they did not write. That possibly the whole thing was this massive mind control experiment. Give people drugs, encourage them to engage in behaviors that are unhealthy and immoral, and convince them that what is happening is good, and that there mind is being expanded and that they are being liberated.

Besides the hippies, the rock stars, the drugs, and the cults, there was also a huge amount of unexplained murders and suicides and all sorts of weird phenomena going on in 1960s Laurel Canyon. Most notable were the Manson murders. But there were many more that occurred long before the hippies even arrived on the scene. Maids and butlers that ended up floating dead in the pool or thrown out of windows. Numerous suicides and car accidents that seem a little fishy. There were huge multi-million dollar mansions from the 1920s that looked like something out of an old black and white horror movie, with peepholes in the eyes of paintings, secret levers with hidden passageways behind book cases, and subterranean tunnel systems all over the Canyon connecting different houses and parks, with evidence for occult activity having occurred.

Anyway, since I've never been to California, and prior to reading this book, didn't really know much about the history of Laurel Canyon, which is located in the Hollywood Hills outside Los Angeles, what I did while reading it was supplement my reading with looking up pictures from the era online, looking at archived photos of the people and houses and specific locations mentioned in the book. I also went on YouTube and looked up some of the bands and listened to a sampling of songs. I was already familiar with a lot of the music groups from the era, was a huge Doors fan back in my teenage years, but some of the music I wasn't too familiar with. Most notably Frank Zappa, which I had heard of, but didn't really listen to, and the band Love, which I don't think I ever listened to, or if I had heard it didn't know who it was. I don't know how I managed to not listen to Love before, because their really good. 

This is the best album of there's by far: Love - Forever Changes (1967). 

In closing, here's a sample from that album:  

Seeing Orange

Been reading The Adding Machine, a collection of essays by William S. Burroughs.

Some essays are pretty good, most are nothing special, but there was one essay that described a writing exercise, or rather an exercise in paying attention, in observational awareness, that he used during his brief stint as a creative writing teacher at a college in New York City. Which was to pick a color, take a walk, and look for the color. Look for any traces of the color within your field of vision. 

So if, for instance, you choose orange, you spend the next few minutes or hours, paying attention to things that are colored orange. Seeing orange cars. Seeing orange lights. Seeing orange t-shirts. Bicycles. Flowers. Paper. Billboards. Balloons. etc. etc.

That's what I did today. Well, not the only thing I did. Only did it for like twenty minutes, en route to running my daily errands: post office, bank, store, library, etc. etc.

Thinking maybe I should do an exercise in seeing green, try to materialize some money out of thin air. Yeah, next time, I'll keep you posted.

I go to the post office to buy stamps. I leave, walking through the parking lot, I hear somebody shouting: "Can you push my wheel chair for me?" I keep walking, then realize that there is a woman in a wheel chair on the storefront sidewalk, not wearing orange, nevertheless, she is speaking to me. And I'm not the only person around either, there are other people walking to stores, cutting through the parking lot, but this woman focused on me. Me. She wanted me to push her wheel chair to the post office, the post office I just came from, to buy stamps. How weird is that? I'm hardly saying anything, and she's just talking non-stop, about needing surgery, where she lives, which is just down the street, about her husband being ten years younger than her and having stage three cancer, etc. etc.

I don't know this woman, but I've seen her before, at the library, at the grocery store, I helped her once at the library reach a book at the top shelf, a book about the Dead Sea Scrolls. Intriguing, but honestly the woman is annoying. She talks too loud, in what I believe to be either a Long Island or New Orleans accent, and she stinks. Sorry, it's true. I tend to avoid her, but I helped her out today. Seeing Orange.

Reading Bukowski

I've just finished reading my third Charles Bukowski novel, which are all semi-autobiographical. The first, and so far the best, Ham On Rye, I read last year, and the last two, Post Office, and Factotum, I read this week. I was originally also planning on reading Women, his sequel to those books, and started to, but gave up, having concluded that reading Bukowski is a waste of my time.

Why? Because it's all pretty much the same. If you've read one, you've read them all. Bukowski is an alcoholic. All he cares about is getting drunk and getting laid. Sure, he writes about different job experiences, from working over a decade for the U.S. Postal Service, to working dozens of temporary menial labor jobs across the country, but it all centers around his obsession with getting drunk and getting laid. That's pretty much it, the end all be all of his existence. And it gets a bit tiresome after awhile.

Perhaps his essays are better, I may give them a try, but his novels are shit. I really don't get their popularity. Maybe it's because he uses the word "fuck" a lot, and gives graphic descriptions of his sexual experiences, at a time when perhaps few did, which maybe gave him a sort of countercultural appeal, I don't know. He does on the other hand have a very easy to read style, but ultimately its very shallow, that when its over you feel like you've gained nothing.

The only thing I really liked about it were some of his insights concerning the absurdity of certain types of jobs, and the humorous ways people adapt themselves to it.

Here's a good quote, probably the best quote out of the entire book, from Factotum:

--- "How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?"

"I had elaborated on my work experience in a creative way. Pros do that: you leave out the previous low-grade jobs and describe the better ones fully, also leaving out any mention of those blank stretches when you were alcoholic for six months and shacked up with some woman just released from a madhouse or a bad marriage. Of course, since all my previous jobs were low-grade I left out the lower low-grade." ---

I've been there, unfortunately, if you are a hardcore alcoholic who follows this line of thinking to its logical conclusion, you'll likely end up an unemployed wino sleeping outside on park benches or living under a bridge begging for spare change and eating out of dumpsters. Or if, like Bukowski, you happen to win the lottery and manage to make millions of dollars off of mediocre writing, you can drink yourself into an early grave without ever having to work another day of your life and without ever becoming homeless. But you'll still be just as pathetic, except you'll be too drunk to care.

That's Bukowski, everybody: alcoholic, sexaholic, bum; with an occasionally good insight, but mostly not worth reading. That's my assessment. It's something that would only appeal to alcoholics, sexaholics, slackers/bums, or people under 25.

Well, it's not like I didn't already know that going in, but was hoping that maybe there was something more to it that I might have missed had I not read it. Guess not. Most people read this shit when their sixteen, I waited until I was in my thirties. Better late then never, and good riddance. Burroughs is a dirty old bastard too, but definitely more interesting. I'll be reading him next.

The Yage Letters

Just finished reading The Yage Letters, it's the fourth book I've read so far by William S. Burroughs, and it was a major disappointment. Not good at all. It sounded intriguing, the search for a drug that is said to stimulate sensitivity to telepathic communication; that's something that is totally up my alley. In fact, if you know of any books that deal with that subject matter, please do send them my way, via email or the comments, I'll look into it immediately.

Anyway, Burroughs lived many years south of the border in Mexico, mostly to escape prison time in the U.S. for long-time opiate addiction and dealing, and during his time there traveled extensively through Central and South America. This book, presented as a series of letters to friend Allen Ginsberg, chronicles his search for the hallucinogenic vine Yage, also known as Ayahuasca.

His experience with it was nothing special, and mostly negative. Though I have to say his documentation of the experience, not only of using, but the whole process of finding it, and the cultural folklore, encounters with shamans and such, acquired along the way was very brief and incomplete. Read more like informal letters to a friend, rather than an anthropological survey, which of course is I guess all that it was intended to be. But based on his other writings and ideas, which I believe are best captured in his interviews, where his extensive knowledge and intellect really shines, he could have done a lot better than this.

It's just that there wasn't really enough there in my opinion to even publish it as a book. The whole thing was less than eighty pages, and most of it, despite the title and description, centered not around the search for Yage, but the search for casual sex with young men, who in some cases were still what you would call boys, teenagers, barely legal. Okay, I don't care about Burroughs' homosexuality, doesn't bother me, but men who are over forty-years-old cruising for one night stands with 15 year old boys is in my opinion disgusting.

Its value is primarily autobiographical, but as far as providing information about Ayahuasca, and being a travelogue of 1950s Latin America, its value is minimal.

I don't know why, but I always seem to gravitate to reading dirty old men, people who, like Burroughs, Bukowski, Miller, in real life I would find so repulsive and degenerate that I'd have nothing to do with. I guess it's my shadow, such interests, that manifest purely in literary form, a fascination with inferior men with brilliant minds, tarnished by perverse, decadent habits and thoughts.

I'm not done with Burroughs just yet, but this one has turned out to be the least interesting and most disappointing book of his so far. Though I have to say, his books Junky, Queer, and The Yage Letters should all be read together, they were all written, though not published, around the same time, and deal with the same subject matter, that of addiction, gay cruising (despite the fact that he was married to a woman) and travels, and read like they could have been combined in one big autobiographical novel; with The Yage Letters being better as an appendix, rather than a stand-alone work; though I can understand why they did it that way. Junky was, after all, his first novel, and almost wasn't published. Its autobiographical value wouldn't be realized until many decades later.

I'm looking forward to reading more of his interviews, his novel Naked Lunch, and then moving on to other things for awhile. But I will be back.

Reading Burroughs

So, as mentioned two earlier posts down, I've been taking advantage of the public library's interlibrary loan service, and am presently devoted to reading William S. Burroughs.

I've only read one book of his, that would be Queer, which was okay, but certainly not great. That was not through interlibrary loan, but something I picked up locally. Believe it or not I have not yet read Naked Lunch, which is probably his most famous work, but I do have some familiarity with it, after having seen the movie by David Cronenberg. Not bad. Been awhile since I've seen it though. Not since the late 90s, actually.

Anyway, I'm currently reading The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs, via interlibrary loan. It's not a great book, but it's definitely worth reading if you're interested in learning more about Burroughs.

My feelings about the man are mixed. I'm undecided. Not sure if he is a genius or a raving lunatic. Seriously. There are clearly some things I disagree with, some things that bother me about him. My main problem and primary area of disagreement, is with his apparent dislike, disregard, and blatant misogyny concerning not just the female sex, but with the feminine principle in general. As a female, I feel that basically anyone who states a belief that females are a curse, that the world would be better off without them, is going to get a huge red flag of skepticism and doubt hovering over all that they say, no matter how good and enlightened the rest of it is.

I almost think that I could have been born a man, but instead chose at the last minute to be a woman in order to prove firsthand through experience exactly why advocating the supremacy of the male principle is false. Only a man could believe that woman is a curse. Basically it suggests some major mommy issues, like ah, not getting enough attention or something, or else getting rejected by some other woman that he loved, but didn't return the love, and blaming every other woman that comes along for their lack of love and attention, lack of a strong mother/son bond.

Anyway, there's that, and there's also his rejection of the positive value of the family unit, that I would disagree with completely.

Other than that I would say he's brilliant, especially concerning his understanding of the mechanisms of control, the way governments function, the role of nations, police states and thought control, it's all very interesting. Don't agree with it completely, but it's definitely worth reading. Too bad there are so many brilliant men, that have little regard for women, beyond perhaps their sexual or procreative role, as mothers and lovers, and little else. Too bad. If they were females with the same mind, it would be totally different. It's the same mentality of the white racist. If they were born black, with the same mind, they would cease to be racist, in the sense that they would cease to view a person as inferior solely based on their physical appearance alone.

Don't get me wrong, there's still plenty to love. And I'm planning on reading everything he ever wrote. Pretty much everything except his opinion of females and the family unit is exceptionally interesting.

Coming To My Senses

Obviously posting here has tapered off quite a bit, from every other day to once a week or less, but at the same time I have been writing regularly in my paper journal almost everyday. Mostly it's just notes from what I'm reading, interesting quotes, and stuff to look up later in greater depth, but lately, or at least ever since I started a new paper journal in May, I've been combining my reading notes with personal diary entries in the same place, and gradually refining my system of organization.

Anyway, I've decided that in light of the fact that I've been writing more frequently in my paper journal, and have had nothing to say here, I figured that I would occasionally post something from my handwritten journal, and that is what I thought I'd do here now. I wrote it last month while sitting out on the patio sometime after ten o'clock at night on the 23rd of May, and divided it into 6 parts here for improved clarity.

Transcribed Journal Entry Dated 23 May 2013

Part 1 

Lately I have been having a very hard time finding a book worth reading. I've checked out dozens of books over the last couple of weeks, and most went back without being read. I'd read a few pages, even as much as 50 pages into it, only to slam the book shut, dismissing it as a waste of my time.

A book I was reading earlier today, which I started yesterday, Coming To Our Senses, by Jon Kabat-Zinn, about mindfulness meditation. It was over 500 pages long, and I read the first 50 or 60 pages, something like that, and that is when I suppose I came to my senses that the author used way too many words to get their point across, that everything they said in 50 pages could have easily been said in 10. It felt like a lot of feel good airy fairy new age rainbow family save-the-world-with-kindness crap. I have a low tolerance for self-help guru bullshit. Even that Zen Habits guy is irritating to me, because it has that same tone, sort of like spirituality and simple living advice intended for an elementary school audience, where everyone has this goofy grin on their face, sitting in their magic circle, sharing hugs and feel good stories before nap time, like f*cking Sesame Street for adults.

I've become rather disgusted with the people I read online, almost as much as the people on TV, but not being able to find a good book to read, that I actually enjoy reading has left me in the slumps.

Part 2 

What shall I do with myself if I haven't anything to read? If I haven't anything to read, and I haven't anything to blog about, and it's too hot to go outside, what the hell am I going to do with myself? Should I just focus on making a lot of money, finding as much work as possible to pass the time, working 60 plus hours a week, 12 plus hour days, nothing but working, manual labor, stocking, cashiering, answering phones, typing, etc. etc. until my mind goes numb?

Have you ever had a mind numbing job? I feel somewhat resentful towards people that never had to do manual labor, that never had to work for minimum wage, who didn't get their first paying job until after College - straight from school to a high paid professional job, never having worked for shit wages around shit people. Shit people, what are they? Oh you know, the people who live to get wasted, to think as little as possible, and when not working all time is devoted to finding sources of pleasure at the expense of consciousness. The objective is mindlessness, filling up every second of your time with activities that distract you from reality.

I guess it's the same for people who play a lot of video games. The majority of video games are just as mindless of an activity as getting drunk. It can be fun, yes, but it doesn't really add any lasting value to your life, other than passing the time in an artificially induced state of consciousness resembling sleep.

Part 3 

I used to play video games. I had an old Atari 2600 way back in the early 80's, but that was really basic, the games weren't very realistic or absorbing. In the 5th grade, I befriended a computer nerd, well actually his older brother was the computer wiz who eventually went on to MIT, but he had all the latest computer gadgets, and games from the 80's like Bard's Tale, King's Quest, I forget all the titles, but eventually he ended up getting a Nintendo Entertainment Center, was the first person I knew to get one, and I often came over to his house to play it with him, games like Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Brothers, Metroid,  Ninja Gaiden, Mike Tyson's Knockout. Eventually I knew about five friends who had a NES, with different games, so I was able to play a lot of them without ever actually owning an NES of my own.

Finally when Christmas came around, probably around the age of 12 or 13, instead of getting an NES I asked for a Sega Master System, and then a year or two later I got the Sega Genesis. I chose Sega over Nintendo because at the time the graphics were better, but I was the only one I knew among my friends and cousins who had one, everyone else had the Nintendo, so I was sort of the odd one out. Problem was is that although Sega's graphics were better, Nintendo had better games, and more to choose from. But that didn't matter so much, because my parents weren't very wealthy, I hardly had any games, and rarely ever got new ones, maybe only about two or three a year, whereas my wealthier friends seemed to get a new game every month. So I was very selective about the games I asked for, carefully researching them, reading the video game reviews, strategically looking for games that offered the most amount of game-play for the money, and two of my favorite games I had were Phantasy Star 1 and Phantasy Star 2. They were role-playing games offering hundreds of hours of game play. I played it all the time, really got sucked into it. RPG's were my favorite genre, but Sega hardly released any new RPG's, so as time went by not having any new games to play I gradually stopped playing, and by the time I entered the 9th grade I didn't play video games at all, other than occasionally dropping a few quarters at the arcade while hanging out at the mall.

Part 4 

It wasn't until my mid 20's - I forget exactly how old I was, but maybe around 25, that I started playing video games again. I bought a Sega Dreamcast, and soon after that I got an Xbox, and got into playing a lot of video games for a couple of years, and also played a few games on my laptop, but by my 30th birthday I would say that other than playing poker and a few other simple browser based games like word games and cards I had pretty much stopped playing video games, at least nothing like before. When I used to play RPG's and First-Person-Shooters it was like entering another world, it really sucked you in. The last RPG I obsessively played, as in spending 12 hours or more playing it on my days off from work, was The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind. But one day, sometime in my upper twenties, probably around the time that I discovered blogging, ironically enough,  I decided I had had enough of it, saw it as a totally nonconstructive activity. It felt like I was wasting my life playing video games.

So I stopped, sold all of my games and consoles, and have had no desire to play those kind of games since. I'm completely off it.

Part 5 

A lot of people, usually people who are themselves video game addicts and looking for anything to justify or defend their habit as being good, try to defend video games saying that they are stimulating to creativity, and that they also help with issues of depression or loneliness. But I myself, as an ex-video game addict, consider most of it - especially RPG's and First-Person-Shooters, the kind of games that really pull you in to the story, that are more realistic, that are like escaping into an alternate dream world - as a huge waste of time.

I decided, upon having this realization, seeing that I had spent thousands of hours playing games with absolutely nothing to show for it - that I did not become smarter, kinder, richer, stronger, or more prosperous, that I did not become a more knowledgeable person as a result of playing all these games - I realized that it was all for nothing. Even if it was fun at the time, it was a lot like dreaming, like chasing shadows, indulging in illusions as if they were facts, I figured I would be better off reading books. Even reading fiction would be more valuable than playing video games, because there is more to be learned from them, as far as improving verbal fluency, vocabulary, insights into human psychology, and basic facts about the world.

Part 6

Well anyway, I decided that from that point forward instead of playing video games I would read books. I've always read books, but when I was playing video games I spent more time doing that than reading. Now, I read maybe 30 or 50 books a year, and before I read just a few.

So I went from obsessively playing video games to obsessively reading books, but reading books felt like a more constructive use of time, not just about acquiring more information and better information, but improving my literacy, my vocabulary, and to some extent my communication skills. That the more I read, the more I'll learn, and the smarter I'll become. And I don't get that from playing video games.

I suppose there is probably nothing wrong with playing video games, per se, but there is only so much time in the day, and any time spent playing video games means there is less time available for doing other things that are potentially much more useful. It all comes down to what you want to do, of what you wish to accomplish, and how you wish to use your time. Personally I see video games as being pretty much equal to watching television. It's okay in moderation, but spending several hundred hours doing it is probably not going to help you build a better life for yourself. You'd be better of reading a book, exercising, or going for a walk.

Pilgrimage as Purification

"The more difficult the journey, the greater the depth of purification."

This is an old Tibetan saying recorded by Austrian mountaineer Heinrich Harrer in his WWII era travel memoir Seven Years in Tibet. I read the book a few years ago, and it stands out in my mind as being one of my all time favorite adventure travel books.

I bring it up because a couple nights ago I watched the movie adaptation, starring Brad Pitt, which is not nearly as good as the book, but being a fan of mountaineering movies in general and anything to do with Tibet, it was worth watching again for that reason alone. Well, this was the second time I saw the film, the first time was shortly after its theatrical debut back in the late '90s. So it had been awhile, was almost like seeing it for the first time. And like I said, while I enjoyed the book version very much, the movie version, though it has some merit, is not really anything special, but on this second viewing one line stood out to me that I found thought provoking enough to write it down in my journal and share it with you here.

"The more difficult the journey, the greater the depth of purification."

I thought that was an interesting line. It was in reference to the fact that the Tibetan people as a whole, both peasant and priest, were culturally orientated toward going on regular pilgrimages. It was believed that the act of pilgrimage, walking long distances over difficult terrain to visit sacred sites, while enduring numerous obstacles along the way, would help cleanse one's sins. That the more difficult the journey, the more rewarding that journey would be. So it was like an act of atonement, a way of finding forgiveness and consolation and strength in moving forward, helping one to discard, however large or small, the bonds of guilt and grief and discontent accumulated from past misdeeds and mistakes.

Though I suppose that's true of all pilgrimages, not just Tibetan, about it being an act of purification; that regardless of which spiritual or religious point of view one is aligned with, a pilgrimage is fundamentally about seeking clarity through the purification of negative thoughts.

Kind of reminded me of the Catholic concept of purgatory, that intermediary stage between death and resurrection, except that the pilgrimage is a sort of a purgatory one experiences while still alive. You could say that it's a way of dying, without dying, to be reborn again in this life; where pilgrimage provides a means of purification along the journey to enlightenment.

As a hiker, who also considers myself to be a spiritually minded person, what I find exceptionally interesting about pilgrimage, is that not only does it involve travel and adversity as a means of purification, but that walking in particular is considered an essential component of it. And I think that is not simply because of the fact that walking is more challenging, particularly because it is slower, and a greater hardship if you must carry your own gear, but that it is also because of the very specific state of mind that walking tends to inspire.

For instance, walking is more humbling, because you are more vulnerable, being momentarily homeless, living out of a bag, perhaps sleeping outside, and at the mercy of the hospitality of strangers. But another reason is that walking is essentially a moving meditation, which helps to ground you to the immediacy of the ever changing landscape of the moment; where there is struggle, but also exceptional clarity and mindfulness which makes it all the more conducive to the task of mental and spiritual purification.

Scattered Reading Habits

Hmm, while looking through the list of books I've read over the last six years, it's come to my attention that strangely enough for someone who professes a primary interest in the subjects of health and fitness and longevity, I've only read five books on those topics since 2006. Isn't that odd?

Of course, this list only mentions completed books, and not books I may have browsed through but not read from cover to cover; or magazines and websites related to health and longevity; or books I've read prior to 2006.

But still, for someone who reads a lot, it is peculiar to me that I haven't read more on these subjects. Is it because I feel like I already am well educated in these matters, that I no longer need to read books about it, because I already know all there is to know about health and longevity? Well, if that were the case, I better start writing about it then, right? But no that's not the case. So what is the conclusion then? That I better get cracking; meaning that I better start reading some health and longevity books soon.

Of course my problem, as far as independent study goes, is that I tend to jump around. I lack focus. I get bored easily. As soon as I read one thing, I find something else to read that is extremely interesting to me but completely unrelated to what I just previously read. It happens every time. When it comes to my education, I really don't have a definite plan, or specific goal. All I know is that I like to learn, and enjoy reading about whatever interests me, which changes from month to month.

Which means that I acquire a basic understanding of several different topics, but attain mastery of none. Instead of reading five good books on one topic, I read five good books on five different topics, and then I read five more books on five other topics, and then after a few months maybe I'll read a book on a topic I've already read about. It's sort of a scattered approach to learning; it's a very slow and unfocused process.

Although the more I read, no matter how different the subjects, I suppose it's improving my overall reading proficiency, my vocabulary, reading speed, and comprehension, which I hope is also carrying over into the way I think and communicate, and especially in the way I write. As they say, if you want to become better at anything: practice, practice, practice. If you want to become a better reader, spend more time reading. If you want to become a better writer, spend more time writing. If you want to become a better speaker, spend more time speaking. If you want to become better at anything, spend more time doing it.

It's really as simple as that. So while reading a lot of unrelated topics may not give you mastery of those topics, it will improve your general knowledge, your reading skills, as well as your overall competency with words, whether that be reading, writing, or speaking. But, reading in itself, is not my primary goal. The goal is knowledge, understanding, wisdom. Reading is the means, not the end. If you are interested in health, it pays to read a lot about health. If you are interested in business, it pays to read a lot about business. The more you concentrate on a specific thing, the more you read about it, think about it, speak about it, write about it, the more you will learn about it, the more you will know about it, and the more successful you will be in this subject.

In other words: the more you concentrate, the faster you'll learn; the less you concentrate, the slower you'll learn.

This is so obvious that it probably doesn't even need to be said. And yet, despite being so obvious, why is it so difficult for me? Why do I continue to jump around? Why do you suppose this is? I think it is because my mind is so active, and has so many different interests, that if I don't add variety to my reading I become easily bored.

This I think explains my lack of success, or rather my lack of mastery of any single topic. The fact that I jump around a lot, means that it could take me years to master one topic that someone else could master in months.

I think besides having an overactive mind, another reason for my scattered reading habits is due to indecisiveness, of not being able to make up my mind of what I want to master. I'm over 30 and I'm still struggling with the idea of what I want to be when I grow up. Am still conflicted over whether or not I should integrate my passions and interests (which are just as scattered and unfocused as my reading habits) with my employment, or if I should continue to keep them separate. The idea of the latter, being that you develop a business plan that would enable you to make more money working fewer hours, which doesn't necessarily need to be a job you love, but would be lucrative enough to give you an abundance of free time to pursue your real passions in life; like what The 4-Hour Work Week guy suggests.

The second of the two options is what I've unsuccessfully been attempting to do over the last few years, but unfortunately the income has not been lucrative enough to give me the time I need. Instead of working 4 hours a week, it would be 40 hours of hell, multiplied by several months, all done with the aim of taking an extended vacation to pursue doing the things I love. This plan works out all right the first or second time around, but as the years go by, you find out that you're still spending more time doing what you hate, than doing what you love, which is not a very healthy long-term plan. Option two only works if you have a lucrative business or skill.

So you basically have three choices: you either have to figure out a way to make a lot of money in a short period of time, or a job that enables you to have fewer hours with higher pay, which will give you the free time that you need to pursue the things you love; or you have to love what you do regardless of how little you make; or you just make the best of your situation and stop complaining about it.

And what does this have to do with my scattered reading habits? My scattered reading habits are a reflection of my scattered employment habits. The difference between having a focused goal and not having a focused goal, is the difference between having a job you hate and a job you love.

Successful people are focused people. They have goals, and they achieve them. Without a plan, what have you got? Chaos. Weakness. Uncertainty. Indecisiveness. Being lost. Not knowing where you are, who you are, or where you're going. Very easy to be taken advantage of or manipulated in such a situation. The strong shepherd the weak, but the strong are not always your allies, the strong do not always have your best interests at heart. The strong have their own goals, they know exactly what they want, and will use other people to get it. Which reminds me of the Occupy Movement, a mob without a clearly articulated goal or unified objective, is easy prey for outside manipulation from those who do know what they want, but whose longer range goal may not have the mobs true interests at heart. In other words, a leaderless mob, will gravitate to a leader, any leader, even the wrong one, even a tyrant.

As far as my scattered reading habits go, it's good that I at least continue to maintain an interest in learning, that I continue reading books on my own without being required to. Surprisingly many people once their out of school, stop reading all together. Or if they do read, it's limited to magazines and newspapers and novels. Reading is certainly not the only way to learn about things, but I think it gives a decided advantage. The only danger though, is that while it's good to read, you shouldn't read too much, to such an extent that reading become a substitute for thinking. When that happens, you stop learning, and your imagination starts to die. You could read a whole library of books in this way, and not have a single original thought of your own to contribute. In fact you would become more like a robot, and less like a human. What a sad state of affairs that would be.

You want to think about what you read and apply it to your own life and your own experience, to synthesize the ideas with your own, rather than thoughtlessly regurgitating everything you read word for word like a parrot; this is the difference between thinking and repeating, and between understanding and memorizing without understanding.

So the point is that scattered reading is probably better than no reading, but you'll achieve more from your reading with focused concentration. Having a clearly articulated goal, while at the same time being flexible enough to modify your course as necessary, will yield faster, more concentrated, and more productive results than not having a goal at all.

The Difference Between Thinking and Reading, Realizing and Repeating

Our creative faculties are all too often stunted from living in noisy overdeveloped urban environments, and spending too much time indoors watching television and looking at computer screens, but did you know that even reading too much can also be detrimental to your creative faculties?

How so? Well as someone who absolutely loves books, spends a lot of time reading books, and whose life would be significantly diminished without books, what the hell do I mean?

It's not that reading in itself is detrimental. Of course not. Reading is good. Reading is the surest way of rapidly improving your education. But reading too much, without regularly taking time out for personal contemplation, to process what you've read, to think for yourself, to directly listen and observe and ask yourself questions and form your own answers, without doing that, both reading and watching television, or doing anything that becomes a substitute for thinking, can become detrimental to your intellect.

It is possible to be an avid "well read" reader without being a thinker, without being much of a creative, independent, or innovative thinker.

There are a lot of repeaters in this world, many who are overpaid and overrated, people who dutifully repeat whatever the experts say, without really understanding or verifying the facts independently for themselves.

It is possible to appear quite learned and intelligent by merely memorizing what you have read or what you are told by others, to be a walking encyclopedia, a human computer regurgitating assorted facts and trivia, while at the same time being little more than a thoughtless repeater, a programmed robot parroting other peoples ideas without having any actual experiential grasp or understanding of those ideas independent of books or words, or without even having any original thoughts and ideas of your own.

Well maybe you'd counter that there are no original ideas, that there is really nothing new under the sun, everything is borrowed, recycled, rediscovered, and re-exchanged. That all ideas are a collaborative affair, and that nothing is truly independent or original. Maybe so, but in this case, when I speak of an original idea, I mean it in the sense of the idea arising from the quiet contemplation of your own mind. It doesn't matter if that idea was partially shaped and influenced by other ideas not uniquely your own, nor does it matter if you are not the only one, or are only one among thousands receiving the same insight or realization. What matters is the experience of the idea arising seemingly independently within your own mind, rather than being feed a prepackaged version that requires little to no thinking or experiential knowledge.

I hope I inspire you, but ultimately your inspiration is your own, is a personal relationship between the inner you and the outer world. You may feel as if the inspiration comes from outside of yourself, but actually inspiration always originates from within each person. Or rather, it is an experiential connection between the microscopic and macroscopic, between self and the cosmos.

Inspiration is like a radio frequency that's always on, but is only received if you are tuned to the right channel. When you are inspired by someone or something, it's not that they are the source of inspiration, but that all that is happening is that they've helped you turn the channel within yourself in alignment with the frequency of inspiration, that they too are tuned into, but it is up to you how long you maintain the connection, whether you raise or lower the volume, or whether you change to a different channel completely.

All knowledge and insight emerges from a receptive state of mind, but there is a difference between receiving ideas from others in their finished product already translated into words, and having the same ideas emerge independently in your own mind. There is a difference between experiential knowledge obtained on your own, and theoretical knowledge obtained from others. Theoretical knowledge can be experienced if the abstract ideas can be applied to the real world, as theoretical principles visualized affecting objects in space, or otherwise conceptualized having some real world application. And of course experiential knowledge can be translated into theoretical knowledge the very moment it is articulated into words.

If you get most of your ideas from books, from other people, without actually experiencing the insights yourself or applying them to the real world in your own way, how many ideas in your head are actually your own? Not only that, but to what extent do you truly understand and have personally tested what you are reading, and to what extent are you merely repeating?

That's the primary danger of reading too much, that of thinking too little. When reading and absorbing other people's ideas becomes a substitute for thinking, that's what I mean when I say that reading too much can potentially be detrimental to your capacity for independent creative thought.

Read to enhance your mind, not to completely erase your mind and replace it with somebody else's. The goal should be the expansion of consciousness, not the annihilation of consciousness. So by all means don't stop reading, but do consider turning off the television and going outside more.

Just make sure to also spend some time thinking, questioning, contemplating, realizing, and better yet reading the wordless wisdom written in the tapestry of the earth and the sky, and listening to nature's wordless sounds circulating all around, within and without, above and below, and beyond the written word of pseudo experts, thoughtless repeaters, and other overrated clowns.