It's a Beautiful Day

"My life is like a good book I just can't put down."

Today was so warm and beautiful Nancy and I went for a walk with the dogs. The sky was blue and the sun was shining a little nip in the air.

I just want to report that I am

WarGames

"We surrender to win."

What are you fighting with today? I was talking to a good friend and she helped me notice that I was in the food too much again. Something I have realized again and again is that obsessive thinking in any capacity is not helpful. I make a decision not to eat something and this rebellious part of me comes out and seems to only want to eat that thing I said I wasn't going to eat. The craving to eat whatever it is takes on an obsessive quality to it. And the other side of the same coin, even when I am successful at following a plan of eating, I can get just as obsessive in my thinking about that. The obsession about food is still there. It doesn't matter if the object of the obsession is about a craving or about health.

It makes me wonder if staking the position, or obsession itself, is the problem rather than the object that is being obsessed about? And I guess that's what's meant by the expression, "Turn it over to God."

I also think of that old movie "WarGames" with Matthew Broderick. Broderick's character hacks into a military computer and it starts playing a game of thermonuclear war which threatens to start World War III. The take home message being that sometimes the only way to win a game is not to play.

This doesn't mean I am giving up doing raw foods, it means I am giving up being so obsessive about it and trying just to do it by willpower. I did really well yesterday in sticking with it and I am extra motivated because I went to the doctor's and got on the scale. I actually gained weight and wasn't too happy about it. This is what started the whole obsessive downward spiral in thinking.

So I am committed to sticking with the 80/10/10 raw vegan plan for the next 2 weeks and seeing if there is improvement.

Hall of Mirrors

"Last night I had a dream I was a butterfly. Now I'm not sure, am I a butterfly who is dreaming being human or am I human dreaming to be a butterfly?" Unknown

I remember the first time I realized that I had absolutely no contact with the world outside my own mind. It felt like breaking free of a prison I didn't even know I was in. I was in a college philosophy class and we were talking about reality. and how do we know what reality is?

I know what my senses tell me but my senses can't be trusted to tell the truth. My senses tell me the world is flat and stationary and I know that's not so. The demonstration in class that day was that we were to write what we saw in front of us, very simply. I saw a green chalk board.

Photos of light come from the sun and bounce of this object and into the rods and cones of my eyeballs which send information through my optic nerve to my brain. the brain processes this and comes out with green chalk board. So the whole lesson was illustrating basically how the green chalkboard exists in my brain and what is actually "out there" in the world we really don't know. We only have the very limited information that our senses tell us which we each have our own different filters this info goes through as well. We only ever see our mind in what ever we are looking at. I don't even know what's actually there and I am sure as hell not qualified to comment on it. What I see is MY truth not necessarily THE truth.

What I see in the world is always a reflection of my mind.

And on a slightly different train of thought, the idea that our body and the world are the same thing. If I understand correctly, other cultures have words that describe this idea but the English language does not have a word that describes us this way. We tend to think of our body as separate from it's world even though we have absolutely no evidence that supports that. Have you ever experienced your body without it's environment? Have you ever experienced the world without your body? So why do we think they are 2 separate things? In fact, the Ishaya's do call it our 'body-world.' I have heard Wayne Dyer use the term 'environ-organisms' to express the same idea.

I have no idea why I wrote about this today. It was just on my mind. I was inspired by Douglas's comment and just went off on a tangent... :)

The Spiritual Experience

" If it is spoken, it is already a distortion of truth."

A spiritual experience is just that, an experience. It seems that it can't be truly shared with words. I have been to the beach. If you have never been to a beach before, I could tell you my experience of the beach. I can give you directions to the beach. You could even get in the car with me and I could take you to the beach.
Not so with spiritual experiences. I can describe my spiritual experience to you. I can tell you how I got there, but I can't take you there. You must take your journey and have your own experience.

spiritual blunder #327
Many people find God and many are life long spiritual seekers.
One day some spiritual seekers found some spiritual finders and the finders tried to help the seekers become finders too. The finders pointed their fingers toward God and said, "Look there is God." The seekers then looked at the pointed finger and exclaimed, "Ah-ha, there is God!" They began to make icons of and worship the pointed finger. They got stuck on what was doing the pointing rather than discover what was being pointed to.


My teacher, Kali, most always opens her lessons by saying, "Nothing I am about to say is the truth." My internal response to that is usually relaxation. I am reminded to not take thoughts so seriously. I can't even claim the thoughts are mine anymore because it's starting to seem that everyone is plugged into the same thought river. I notice how the mind seems to always be poised to stamp something as either ACCEPTED or REJECTED. The relaxation helps to turn inward and notice what happens between the thoughts. Have you ever noticed what exists between thoughts?



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In the core of your being is something stronger and deeper than any thought or emotion, and this something must be followed.

Ultimately you know. Then the challenge is to surrender. The challenge is to honor what you know beyond knowing, and to accept the knowing beyond any attempt to mentally prove it.

Trust the deepest intuitive knowing within you regardless of the inconvenience.

When you get into relationship with your own self appearing as teacher, it is usually quite ruthless. There is no possibility to own, to control, or to direct.

If you have met a true master, you will find it is impossible to adopt either stance. You are not allowed to imagine yourself as either dependent or independent.

People who look deeper get to experience the endless depth of a raging tiger who will destroy your suffering; blessedly and ruthlessly.

Anything else is just child's play--playing a game of awakening, while always attempting to maintain control.

From "You are That" Gangaji

Dieting Doesn't Work

So I haven't been very focused on this for the last few days. I have been eating mostly fruit and some greens but then at night I have been giving in to tofu cravings. And it seems weird to be craving tofu, of all things! And I went out to dinner at a Thai place and had mainly raw and cooked veggies.
I'm not trying to be perfect about this whole thing. I have tried "dieting" for so many years that today I tend to agree with this:

Diets fail because they are predicated on a desire to replace something ‘bad’ with something ‘good’. This kind of illusory thinking sets up all kinds of resistance in an already threatened system. We all are habituated or ‘addicted’ in a sense to whatever we require to maintain an acceptable level of function. The things we depend on should never be thought of as bad for us as this type of thinking just adds to the negative impact of our environmental circumstances. Rather we might consider a gentle systematic approach with an eye toward becoming differently adapted to a more helpful set of environmental signals. There need not be any sense of substituting something good for something bad...

..It appears much is being made of specialized diets consisting of most or all uncooked food. Though an interesting twist in the history of diet reform as a means to physical and spiritual enlightenment, the suggestion of ‘raw food’ as a single point solution falls short of providing a complete reality map one could follow to a satisfying conclusion. With the level of compromise most of us have experienced at least on the physical level, even the most gradual attempts to reform our environment will eventually be met with insurmountable resistance. Diet as well as any other environmental outcome is the result of years of adaptation which controls how we filter our universe. Perhaps it would be wiser to consider gently transitioning our filtering interface rather than using another’s will power as a crutch. BLINDGURU

So I've eaten the last of the tofu and I am consciously making a decision to not buy more. I am curious to find out what this is about. I highly suspect it is emotional so guess I'll have to feel something.


Everything in this room is eatable. Even *I'm* eatable! But that is called cannibalism, my dear children, and is in fact frowned upon in most societies. Willy Wonka

811rv Day 1

Today is Day 1 of my 811rv food plan.
I am keeping track of what I eat and how much at www.nutridairy.com

Damn this seems like a lot of fruit. I am having some doubts about this but I am going to try it for at least 2 weeks and see what happens. I have read the book. I have heard Dr Graham's claim of busting the myths of why humans should avoid eating too much fruit. I will need to see the results for myself. I mean, after all, every single diet book I have read seems to give logical well researched evidence (with testimonials) clearly demonstrating how their diet is best.

My own research and previous 20 years experience with dieting and searching for health has lead me to 80/10/10 raw vegan, so we'll see what happens.

Day one wasn't so hard. I miss the fat and salt but other than that it was pretty easy. I really enjoyed my dinner. It was a blended salad of

8 oz spring mix
3 stalks celery
1/2 papaya
garnished with 6 oz raspberries

It was awesome!

*After* then but *Before* Later

Through learning how to both love myself and manage energy more effectively, I have been able to release 107 lbs of excess weight. I still say it's a *Before* shot because I have 60-80 more lbs to go before getting to my healthy, ideal weight. I still live with the fibro and CFS, but it's much better than it used to be.

I get reminders all the time that it's not all about the weight. It's not about the food. Are you happy, joyous and free? Are you living authentically? Do you love and are you loved? To that I say, "YES!"

*After* Then but *Before* Now

This is me (left) and my beautiful, loving, hilarious, supportive, crazy, adorable wife, Nancy. (I may get extra points for publishing that on the web!) This pic is from about 4-5 years ago. My health had improved some but there were still problems. The medications were making things worse not better. I decided to come off all of them. Just by doing that I lost 20 pounds without even trying.

When I was able to get out of bed, I spent a lot of time researching. I looked lots of places for some sort of treatment that would help me get better. Somewhere in my gut I knew health and wellbeing are my birthright. I searched in western medicine, eastern medicine, many types of alternative medicine, psychology, body work and energy work. While on my own healing path I got quite an interesting education.

*Before* Picture

Here is a picture of my dad and I when I was sick. I was embarassed to have my picture taken so this is the only picture I could find of me at that time. (And now here I am posting it on the web.) Instead of feeling embarrassed for how I looked, now I just feel grateful that I don't feel like that anymore.

My dad isn't all that tan, but he sure does look it in this picture, compared to my pasty yellowish-white complexion. This was taken sometime in the late 90's, not too long after I had been diagnosed with fibromyalgia and CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome). I was also (incorrectly) diagnosed with bipolar disorder and on a lot of different medications. I was eating SAD (Standard American Diet) and often binging on junk food. I weighed about 300 lbs. My highest weight that I know of was 321 lbs. I stopped weighing myself after that. I would not be surprised if it actually got closer to 350. I don't believe there is a picture that exists of me at my highest weight.