Money Isn't Everything

I read a wonderful community of bloggers called Reality Sandwich, upon which I find a lot of wonderful ecologically important views and updates, and also stories of people's experiences with drugs, meditation, and their journeys to higher levels of consciousness. When reading these blogs and articles it reminds me that money isn't everything, which is a very simple idea that almost everyone knows, but no one can move past. They're hindered by themselves and they can't see that if they just go out and do what they really love to do they'll be happy enough to not worry about money. It's a sort of self completion.

I, personally, haven't found that sort of happiness yet, but I'm working to it. The first step is recognizing the actuality of the world, the next is acting on the world. I'm not quite there yet. The thought of a world without money would be very wonderful, if it didn't seem so impossible in our reality. The thing to focus on though, instead of despairing in a world where there is always going to be some form of money we need to focus on the positive qualities in our life. The earth and the sun and the trees and people that surround us are really all we need to be happy in our daily routine. It's intuit to our nature to be happy with these things, it's when people's psychology is affected by media and upbringing that they decide that outdoors isn't meant for them.

You decide your own feelings, not your mind. You can be happy if you think about happy things. You can be sad, and stay sad, if all you think about is how full of despair the world is. While recognizing the bad in our life isn't always a negative thing, to keep ourselves sane and healthy we have to focus more on the good in our lives, even if it may seem very small. It's not that small, because it's important enough for you to make yourself feel good, and feeling good is one of the primary goals of a lot of people, so it must be pretty important to have good things in your life.

Free Thinking

I was doing some searching around and realized that when I say 'Free Thinkers' I'm not referencing what some people think. I'm not atheist or agnostic, but I am a rational human being, who puts his thoughts in a logical order so that they can be understood, and in hope of revealing something to the reader that they did not see or know before. To devote yourself entirely to the idea of believing in no God you can excise yourself from the truths that are out there, the simple basic truths that are intuit to humans, and which all have the ability to see, but choose to ignore because of their own biases.

I'm simply talking about love. If we all love one another, then the world will be peaceful. If the world is peaceful there will be no war, little suffering, and harmony between not just the different ethnicities of a nation, but between nations themselves. The key to this is to put yourself into another person's shoes, to use your empathy. The golden rule is really the key to harmony and peace. Let's put together some hypothetical situations to demonstrate the power of empathy.

You're breaking into some one's car to look for some money or something to pawn. You stop suddenly, and think about if someone were breaking into your car, shattering the window, stealing your camera or and iPod, and then leaving before you even knew it happened. It would be upsetting, no?

On the other hand, you've had your car broken into, and you consider why for a moment. Why would a person ever want to break into someone else's car to steal something? Money, right? So why is this person so desperate that they need to be breaking into some one's car to pawn something to get money? Perhaps they were raised poorly, in a neighborhood that wasn't too rich and that's what they learned. Or maybe their family needed them and they didn't go to school, so they didn't get an education, and can't get a job now.

What I'm getting at here is that blaming someone for being poor isn't the right way to go about dealing with the problems we have. Let's say by an act of pure luck the person came back with your stolen property, returned it, and apologized? What would you do? The only thing that any decent human being should think is to forgive. There's always going to be feelings of hostility in those kinds of situations, but you have to be able to overcome your hatred and jealousy and fervor in light of acceptance and love. The only way we as people will survive another century is to care for one another and understand where other people are coming from, and that is the free thinking that I'm talking about: being able to rid yourself of your negative emotions, accept reality for what it is, and think freely with love, and once you can do that, you can start to see other people not in the context that your society has set forth, but as another human being, just like you, formed from a different mold under different circumstances, but still just as human and facing or having faced similar problems as you.

Opening Thoughts

As we travel through life with our uncertainties, whether we acknowledge them or not, it's always warming to think of the reasons that you start anything. Even waking up is sometimes hard for me, but every day when drowsiness leaves me and I just stare at my alarm clock there's really no other choice than to get up and start the day. The reasons I began this blog are basically the same. I stare aimlessly at the computer screen from time to time, wondering what will become of my life and ideas, and having a clear understanding of composition I've always turned my thoughts into prose or poetry or some other form of writing, the problem is that I never share any of these with anyone, only with those who happen upon me at the time of creation or shortly thereafter.

I don't consider myself a brilliant writer or even a good one, merely an educated person, who's abilities enable him to share his perspective with others in a clear manner, and that's what I want to accomplish here. I welcome all comments and thoughts, emails, suggestions, or anything that you feel would be a contribution to humanity and a broadening of the world's perspective.