The end may not be so bad if it's a new beginning

In nature and popular fiction metaphors, the end of the day is marked by sunsets and twilight. It’s often portrayed as beautiful, a great time to reflect on life’s wonders, miracles, and pleasures.

Photographers love to take sunset and twilight photos for the quality of the light and the vivid colors. Artists love to paint end of day scenes, too. People like to gather in their favorite spots in nature to watch the show.

But what about the sunset and twilight that are end of life for people? Are they held with sweet regard for a life lived or does the scene become a rush to revive the body at all costs–literally and figuratively?

Reality of the end

My mother and father are both 92, so I am thinking about these issues more. What is end of life like? And under more ideal circumstances, what could it or would it be like?

In much of the world view, of the view we usually call Reality, death is still considered the end of things. Fade to black. Even when millions of people believe in a religious model of an afterlife, the idea of dying still brings on sadness. Sometimes it brings on a sense of tragedy. You’ll often hear the term “tragic death” in the news. We grieve, we weep, we miss.

As someone who has heard and read a lot about near-death and other mystical experiences, the idea of dying is not so disturbing to me. I will be quite surprised if I die and don’t wake up somewhere else. Of course if I don’t wake up I won’t care anyway.I’ll be dead.

But then there’s this

I’ve had conversations with people who experienced NDEs and for most of them dying was a piece of cake. Returning was the hard part.

One person who “died” in a car crash told me that she was out of her body and hovering over the roof of the car before her head hit the windshield. Another woman said that when she realized that the bus was going to smash into her car, she instantly popped out of her body.

Several people who “died” during medical emergencies found themselves hovering over their bodies or appearing in an entirely different environment without at first realizing what was going on. It took them awhile to figure out that they were out of their bodies.

As I talked with these people, I began to conclude that most of the deaths I had ever seen in the movies or on TV were probably inaccurate. They were clearly one-sided depictions because we rarely saw “death” from the point of view of the person who died. We just assumed that dead means most sincerely dead.

Social relevance

My interest in near-death experiences is not just about what happens to us beyond material living. It’s also socially relevant, at least to me. If death is really a transformation instead of a termination, then much of what we encounter at end of life may be wildly misleading. You may disagree, but I believe that there exists a possibility that dying won’t kill me. I might wake up. Consciousness may live on. And if that happens, I will not be pleased with a legal, medical, and sometimes even religious system that doesn’t prepare people for their next life.

Some people are faced with having to make trying medical choices near end of life. Imagine being an elderly housebound person dependent on a walker for your stability and mobility after a long and fruitful life. Then say that you got diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. The medical community would want you to undergo radiation and/or chemotherapy in an attempt to cure the cancer. These therapies are not fun. There can be serious side effects. Would you put yourself through that ordeal to buy a few months of physical life, or would you elect to coast as comfortably as you could through hospice care?

Most social institutions would say go for the cancer treatment. After all, they reason, if there’s a chance for recovery, you should go for it. It usually does not enter into the dialogue that the person can choose to let nature take its course. Choosing to die is usually viewed as giving up or even failing.

What’s also not usually brought up in the conversation is how expensive these treatments are.  If you don’t have the right kind of insurance, medical treatments can break the bank. If the treatments are not guaranteed to restore health, and if the person is realistically close to death, is medical intervention the right course to take?

What if there’s more?

Human life at any age is precious, yet if we had more of a grasp on what may exist beyond the boundaries of a physical life, we might think differently about the end of life. I already do.

If it were absolutely, positively proven that death is transformation instead of termination, would medical science insist on trying to “cure” people of life-threatening diseases when they were old and frail? Would social pressure be so intense on “trying to do everything we can to save” someone if strong evidence suggested that consciousness survives death?

Of course, medical science is not very interested in pursuing the question of soul survival. It’s all about the physical body and business as usual. They maintain that breathing is better than not breathing under nearly any circumstance.

Clearly if a person wants to fight a disease and prolong life, that should be an available option. But if a person chooses not to pursue medical intervention on the grounds that living a few months more is not worth the pain and suffering, that should be honored, too.

End of life celebration

One of my friends (ironically, one who’d had a near-death experience) seemed to sense just under the radar of consciousness that she was due for a real-death experience soon. She threw a party with some good friends attending and celebrated her life, relationships, and friendships. This gave her the opportunity to feel the love while she was still living physically, love that too frequently gets expressed abstractly in funerals rather than directly expressed to the person at tail’s end.

If death is actually like graduating from one school and moving to a new life, then miss people as we might, we would feel less angst and more hope.

That’s the way I would like my sunset to be. Colorfully filled with hope.

Ripe new naughty words

To my way of thinking (oh, geeze!) one of the most absurd concepts to be etched into the granite of society is the one about dirty words. Personally, I think it’s insanity.

We’re conditioned to respond with anything from lust to rage to outrage by the publication, broadcast, or mention of certain words. You know what they are.

The irony I see in this is that all words, clean and dirty, are quite simply symbols that stand for concepts. By their very nature, words are abstract ideas. That makes them fantasies. Our response to a word, whatever the word may be and whatever the response may be, is a fantasy.

Defining a word as off limits to polite society is an exercise in insanity for these major reasons:

1. We create polite words that mean the exact same thing as the dirty words. It’s OK to say the polite words but not OK to say the dirty words? How weird is that? (Plenty weird!)
2. If you don’t know what the words mean, such as if someone is speaking to you in a foreign language you don’t speak, you have no emotional reaction whatsoever to the most raw words and phrases imaginable.
3. Even when we speak a common language, our personal history with words is different. Different upbringings, religious histories, and cultural environments all shape how we use and hear words.
4. Besides that, different countries that share a common language often have words dirty to their own culture but not to neighboring cultures where the same word is still clean or not dirty enough.
5. Some of us, it might be said, are dirty word friendly. We embrace these words as delights, sources of intrigue, thrill pills for the mind. Others of us are not dirty word friendly, and the use of them brings up all the stress and disgust we were taught to feel.

Words have the power to injure and the power to heal, but all that action transpires inside the mind of the perceiver. It’s what we tell ourselves that is important.

In some people’s lives, words have had a devastating impact. That’s because even while words are fantasies, there is a body within the society that takes them with this-is-reality seriousness. People have been maimed, tortured, jailed, fined, or killed for the words that they use.

Among these is the odyssey of the Federal Communications Commission and how it has defined seven truly dirty words, truly dirty in the sense that broadcasters can be fined vast sums of money for uttering them either accidentally or on purpose. Insanity.

Do you not think it is insane that the word fucking is worthy of fine or jail time but the newly minted word effing can safely be used in public? The new word is just the old word with remodeled spelling, but it passes through the dirty word security gate without triggering the alarm buzzer.

How words become dirty

The insanity stems from how a word becomes dirty in the first place. Until it becomes defined as a dirty word, it is just an abstract sound, a random combination of letters. I like to imagine how it all started, the lineage of a dirty word. To best imagine this, maybe we should think up a new dirty word.

Flup.

I’m sorry. I should have warned you to send the kids out of the room and to cover the ears of all remaining virgins.

Anyway, once you have decided on a combination of letters, you need to decide on a precise meaning for your dirty word. Is it a noun or a verb or both? What mental images do you assign to its use? I will let you do this step on your own.

One of the best ways to launch a dirty word is to associate it with promiscuous sex. Write it in lipstick on the hilly slope of some woman’s almost or fully bared breast. Nipple exposure is optional.

A good prerequisite for a dirty word is that its use should inspire an erection in young adult males and vaginal lubrication in young adult females. Primarily this is because while dirty words are often used to express violent thoughts and emotions, they also do double-duty as cerebral aphrodisiacs. (I think this also contributes to word insanity.)

The next part is even more difficult but definitely key. You need to find someone else who will agree with you about this new word. That person must share your enthusiasm that it is absolutely, positively, undeniably a dirty word.

As one might well imagine, if a word is brand new to the listener, it won’t be throwing much of an emotional punch. How excited, aroused, or inflamed is someone going to get over the word flup or the practice of flupping if it’s virgin fresh? How do you make it sizzle? You need to get people to buy into your vision that this is raw and foul and thrilling to say.

This is probably best accomplished by offending someone in authority, be it a judge, religious leader, or someone with the capability of violent reaction. Sorry, but the grim reality is that unless your word offends someone capable of making you a martyr for your creative semantics, your cause won’t go anywhere.

Religion is arguably still the best route to stardom for your dirty word. Some mortal moral authority should convince the populace that God is grossly offended by your new word. Even if you only flup in your heart, God will become grossly offended and might smite you down with a freak accident. You need to be convinced that when you use words like flup you’re rolling down a fast track to the fires of Hell.

Yet having just one religious authority won’t pull much weight. As wolves have discovered, you need a pack to accomplish great deeds. Enough religious leaders need to climb aboard your dirty word train. They need to form a common bond of outrage at what the word flup does to send morality down the toilet.

Speaking of which, it is a grand and glorious idea to link your original dirty word to the other dirty words. If the word flup is alleged to be as foul as the others with substantially more longevity, you’ll be in much better shape. It’s similar to establishing a link to a popular–or unpopular, depending on your point of view–terrorist group. You want to give the impression that people who shamelessly flup are totally bad company.

At the same time, you need to make the word flup popular with an in crowd. The classic in crowd is the bohemian subculture–artists, writers, philosophers, and lovers who live and act free of regard for conventional rules and practices. If the word flup is not perceived as flupping cool to say by bohemian trend-setters, then where will your cause be? If you can’t inspire a loyal group of followers eager to flup the night away, religious leaders will have much less to be proactive about, let alone negactive.

This would not be as tall an order as it might at first seem. Religious leaders often have hair-trigger responses to social trends and seem eager to find new things to rail against. It helps built dramatic tension, which lures the congregation in for another Sunday’s sin-bashing and tithing. As soon as the righteous orators condemn the loose, immoral people for their foul language, it would automagically incite social revolutionaries to flaunt their flupping. The system works like clockwork, almost as if one savvy entity could cash in playing two sides against one another. For instance, they could sell both pro-flupping and anti-flupping t-shirts.

Pornography, of course, is a classic launch pad for new dirty words. It’s already got social conflict going for it with a vast army of opponents. Hire some naughty, nasty, name-calling pornstitutes to walk your talk with the appropriate wiggles and jiggles. Once your word works its way into porn titles, you’re well on your way.

Posterity in action

Years and decades must pass before a given original dirty word becomes as prominent as the words you can’t say on American television. There’s actually intense competition for those top spots where blood will spill and mouths will be washed out with soap and hefty fines will be levied and free men will be jailed when they utter flup and its derivatives.

So plan for the long haul.

And think of this whole process when people get all worked up over those already-famous dirty words. It’s not the word. It’s all the ugliness and angst that people have shoveled onto the word. It’s what you and they perceive the word to mean and the stories you and they make up about its use.

Natural selection and crossed eyes

I can’t go my whole life without commenting on this: I was born cross-eyed.

When I was a little kid I had experimental corrective surgery. Growing up I looked pretty normal. It wasn’t until middle age that I had more of a lazy eye again.

While cosmetic surgery is an option, one opthamologist told me that there were no guarantees that I would not end up with double vision. Oh, joy. Ultimately I decided I’d rather live with wonky eyes than double vision.

Despite what you might think, this hasn’t really been a devastating situation. First off, no matter what it may look like to you, I barely notice it when I am inside looking out. To me whatever is going on in my vision is normal for me. The  only time I notice it is when I look in the mirror. That’s when I scream!

There are even some benefits to this condition. Over the years my eyes decided to specialize. One of them sees better far and the other sees better near. So instead of wearing bifocals, my eyes do the work automatically. My opthamologist called me a natural alternator. That’s pretty cool.

Being cross-eyed is not a birth defect covered in political correctness manners. It seems to be fair game for bad humor in the movies and on TV. No group stands up and protests on behalf of those of us born with wonky eyes.

It really doesn’t bother me that much, though. The funniest cross-eyed joke I have heard was about the woman with a lazy-eyed boyfriend. “He said he only had eyes for me, but he was seeing another girl on the side.”

If I ever suffered any traumatic rejection over the state of my eyes, I don’t really know about it. While it’s open season on making fun of people with lazy eyes, it’s not cool to tell someone, “I’m rejecting you because I can’t get my head around having a friend/lover with a lazy eye. It creeps me out to look at you.” Supposed friends do fade out of my life without explanation or even a farewell email, and I always wonder why. I especially wonder what goes on unspoken behind the scenes.

Yet I also know that we live in a culture where telling the whole truth is not a cherished practice. I am guilty of fashioning cover stories myself. As much as I idealize the depths of honesty and intimacy, I’ve also got heavy training in “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”

When you have what you believe to be a physical defect, the biggest obstacle is projection. I imagine what’s going on inside other people’s minds when they look at me. And all that is my consciousness. I get nervous about the stress they are feeling having to deal with my asymmetrical eyes. In other words, my nervousness stems from my own fantasies.

I deal with the other side of this when I see people who have other birth defects, diseases, or injuries. I fully know that I am slightly afraid of them because I am projecting how I would deal with whatever it is they’re dealing with. With deliberate effort I can intervene on my runaway thoughts and remind myself that their reality is different from my fantasies.

I am most reminded of my birth defect in situations where cosmetically beautiful faces are required … such as appearing on video. I would not look cool on TV. On video you’re supposed to look directly into the camera with your wonderfully aligned eyes and create a sense of (or an illusion of) intimacy with the viewer. Well, shucks. Ain’t gonna happen here.

I’ve accepted that I’m not going to get any modeling contracts from GQ this life.

So what does this all mean to you? Chances are that you’ve got something about you that you aren’t thrilled about. Too fat, too thin, too hairy, too bald, too short, too tall, not enough of this, too much of that. Something keeps you from feeling great about yourself.

Everybody’s got something. So just let it go. Just let it go.

I know, I know. So easy to say. But no one else can save you from your own thinking but you.

It’s going to do you no good to sweat your self-declared flaws and everybody’s got something. Focus instead on all the positive qualities you bring with you.

I like to look at it from a spiritual perspective. I have come to believe, as many do, that as pre-incarnated souls we choose many of the conditions of our births including our parents, our physical problems and predispositions, and even some of the defining events of our lives. It isn’t necessary to totally buy into this, but it’s useful to ask, “If through some cosmic design I chose this, what am I learning from it?” (In my case it’s probably along the lines of beauty is more than physical, but it’s a big one to process.)

Another thing I’ve learned in life is that when you moan and groan about whatever it is about yourself that you hate, someone will point out someone else who’s worse off. When I started moaning about being born with wonky eyes, someone cited the motivational speaker Nick Vujicic born without arms or legs. Yeah, okay.

Breath After Death in Kauai

Writing a novel is an incredible journey in consciousness. It’s time spent with focused attention on a set of themes and ideas, which for me meant stepping out of the box.

I decided to write Breath After Death when I became bored with metaphysical stories that pulled up painfully short from attempting to explain things. For example, I saw a movie where some people were blown up in a terrorist suicide bombing. When they woke up in a new world, they groaned about being dead and gone.

Yeah, they groaned about being dead and gone.

Well, hello? If you can think new thoughts, you aren’t dead. You may have moved from one dimension to another, but in the big picture you’re still alive and groaning. But the movie dumbed it all down, and while these dead people did all sorts of action-adventure antics in their new world, they still thought of themselves as dead. And the peculiar part of it was that they were afraid of being killed again, which makes no sense considering that they were already groaning about having been killed once.

Not once did they question their new environment. They didn’t ask for a map or a guidebook. They didn’t wonder about who was in charge or if there was any orientation available. They simply assumed that they were dead. End of story, except that they weren’t dead.

I have never understood the widespread indifference so many people have to cosmic mysteries like why we’re here on this planet or what happens after we “die.”

By contrast I watch nature shows where they describe incredible and incredibly expensive research projects, such as tagging and monitoring wild animals or migrating sea life. Yet outside of a few voices, science seems disinterested in studying near-death experiences, despite millions of accounts where people report perceiving that their consciousness traveled outside of their bodies and they saw lots of unearthly stuff.

While I always liked Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I was always disappointed that movies like that do not dare to explore the meaning of the paranormal events that occurred. Close Encounters spent most of its time on the question of the Richard Dreyfuss character’s sanity. Everyone thought he was bats. I’ve never seen a movie where the UFOs land and we get to explore “then what? How does this mass landing of extraterrestrials change things?”

Same with most ghost stories. We spend the time trying to figure out if ghosts are real. All the drama of these shows is based on a few readings from some high-tech surveillance equipment. Sensitive microphones capture breathy sounds that people interpret as words from the dead (I usually never hear what they heard.) We don’t come from the viewpoint of “if ghosts are real, then what? How does that change things?”

So I wrote Breath After Death much more as a then-what story. As Benjamin Fields encounters woo-woo experiences, we explore what it might mean.

As I was saying, writing a novel is an incredible journey in consciousness. The writing process is heavily laced with asking “then what?” Much of what ended up happening in the novel came to me as if out of nowhere. I would be writing along asking then what and some dialogue or a plot twist would present itself. “Psst! Josh, go down this path.”

Writing a novel is a serious investment of time and energy. It often takes years to complete, especially if you also have to earn a living doing other things. For me and Breath After Death, that meant thousands of hours daydreaming about such cosmic wonders as near-death experiences, reincarnation, afterlife or spirit communication, Christ, and spiritualizing sexuality.

I have not personally had a profound mystical, out-of body, near-death, or paranormal experience of my own. I have been going on the research and writings and shared experiences of those who have. They were deeply touched by these events. So all the woo-woo that happens in my novel did, in fact, happen to others. I would worry about basing a novel on total fantasy, yet in the end decided to apply then-what. If some phenomenon were real, then what? I don’t need for it to be proven real to ask.

Society as a whole still views death as final. Science seems reluctant to tackle the question. But I created Breath After Death because people I’ve met who have had near-death experiences insist that there is no end.

I invite you to download Breath After Death. (<– click the link!) It’s free. If you have a small fraction of the joy reading it as I had writing it, I think you’ll be pleased.

Look for the good stuff

I’ve heard it expressed in different ways: Beliefs create reality. What you think is what you get. Careful what you wish for; you’ll probably get it.

Psychologists call it selective perception. We see what we expect to see because that’s how our brains process the streams of data gushing through our life at any given moment.

The quality of our life comes down to how we focus our attention. Isn’t that an amazing idea?

Our happiness or sadness or fright is largely determined by how and upon what we focus our attention. Your brain is like an auto-focus camera that is constantly looking to bring you clarity, but it’s you who is holding and pointing the camera.

If you want the world to be a tapestry of scary stories, your brain will do its best to focus on evidence of a frightening world. You’ll watch lots of cable TV and listen to talk radio. You’ll gossip about negative events and dwell on conspiracy theories and gaining the upper hand. So much that you absorb—garbage in, garbage out—will prove to you that life sucks.

On the other hand, if you’re driven to find the good in life, that’s where you’ll focus your attention. You won’t spend your precious time exposing yourself to an onslaught of negativity no matter where it comes from. You’ll constantly seek to find the high road.

I used to laugh at people who spoke of killing their TVs, but over the years I’ve come to see that the TV lens almost always focuses on conflict. Not only have I seen this as a TV watcher, but also as someone who had dreams of writing for the mass media. When I read guides for writers on how to succeed and become a best-selling author, the formula starts with showing conflict. If you’re writing fiction, make your characters’ lives hell. If you’re writing non-fiction, highlight conflict. Show the world in all its misery.

When our mental diets are filled with intellectual junk food, we become emotionally obese. I suspect that behind the majority of the world’s lonely, frustrated, negative people, you’ll find a heavy TV intake. Common sense tells me that if you habitually consume conflict-based media, which most of it is, you’ll wind up with conflict as second-nature. If the media is your primary periscope on the world you live in, you’re going to have a difficult time being inspired.

You might disagree. You might think of a bunch of inspirational movies and TV shows you’ve seen. Yet I have found that most of them still make it a point to inject a lot of negative drama and conflict into the storyline just to give the big finish extra emotional juice. One example would be the movie Shawshank Redemption. I must admit that this is one of my favorite movies, but even so it is extremely saturated in good-evil conflict. It inspires about “hope” by dragging the protagonist through horrors on institutional injustice.

We don’t have many movies that show people dreaming up and living out Utopian visions. Very few sci-fi visions have explored advanced civilizations where people have transcended violence. Despite all of society’s supposed advances since now, Avatar was pretty much of an old cowboy shoot ‘em-up.

I for one would love to see both fiction and non-fiction movies that explore peak experiences, natural ecstasy, bliss, rapture, as well as just plain harmony, problem-solving, and fun. It would be a joy to see visions where people gathered together to share their similarities as well as their differences. I would be fascinated to see the long-term effects on child development (and adult development) if we had more access to positive programming that showed people how to get along, take the high road, and explore the human potential.

Enormous social pressure keeps us focused on negativity. It takes great effort to buck the system, but the great reward is a rich peace of mind. When you focus on the good stuff, good stuff happens.

Download Breath After Death free

Do you ever wonder where your thoughts come from? Does your brain make them up from scratch? Or does your brain process sparks of inspiration that originate from someplace or someone else?

What would you do if you got in your car and a few miles out had the vision of your residence bursting into flames? Would you dismiss it as a needless fear fantasy that your mischievous brain cooked from scratch? Or would you think that it may be a sign that you need to hurry back home and check something out?

That’s the dilemma facing Benjamin Fields in my novel Breath After Death. So begins a spiritual joy ride. And you can read it. Free.

Really, truly. I am not selling you anything.

This is a novel I wrote that I want to launch into global orbit. I want to share this consciousness now.

On the surface the story is about how a guy approaching 40, recently divorced, and unhappy in his work struggles to find a way out. He’s lonely, sexually frustrated, and surrounded by others struggling. Yet that’s all pushing Benjamin on a spiritual quest figuring out how the world works. Why do things happen as they do?

Like me, this book is spiritual but not religious. It’s edgy, sexy, quirky, naughty, out-of-the-box. If any of these words or phrases mean anything to you—law of attraction, reincarnation, near-death experiences, merging sexuality and spirituality, creating a personal paradise, karma, spirit communication, finding a soul mate, relationship issues, enchanted hugging, true intimacy, getting unstuck—you’ll find a feast here.

While written as an entertaining story, there’s lots of spiritual nutrition here. In the book as in my life, I have found that the spiritual journey is one of the most fabulously intriguing pursuits of all.

Breath After Death <– Download it now with a click. Give it a read. Let me know what you think.

I will be using the book as a springboard for some conversations on this blog. Stay tuned.

Love letters happen on the inside first

All the world is a mirror for me. Whatever I see and react to mirrors something in my internal universe.

When I respond positively to something, I am seeing something that stimulates my internal universe in a positive way.

When I respond negatively to something, I am seeing something that does not fit into how I think the universe should be.

Despite the fact that I can make split-second decisions on what I like or dislike, it’s actually an amazingly complex procedure to describe.

For example, what do you think of Tiger Woods? Bill Clinton? George Bush? Sarah Palin? No matter where you go in your thoughts with any of these people, you’re making all your judgments based on your internal universe and the data you have fed into it. Unless you know these people personally and intimately, you are getting all your data through filtered, mostly opinionated sources. You may make snap judgments on them without even thinking. It doesn’t matter whether they are heroic or demonic to you.

Then there are lovers

In a more subtle way, my relationships with lovers over the years works similarly. What I see and experience in the outside world is a reflection of my internal world.

Every time I interact with someone, I am seeing mirror images of myself through that other person. This also includes all the people real or imagined who stimulate thoughts about love and sex. It could be the stranger across the room who doesn’t even see me or know me. It could be a fictional character in a novel or movie. All of the stimulation, good or bad, is really occurring inside my brain.

So let’s say that I am gawking at somebody I find attractive. Really gawking. I could be entranced with that person. We are conditioned to think that it’s that other person who is so fabulously gorgeous (or whatever other quality you want to assign.) We are conditioned to think that the other person, by being so gorgeous, has power over us, as when we are bewitched, bothered, and bewildered. Many of us are conditioned to seek the approval of the people we see as gorgeous (or similarly attractive quality.)

But here’s the thing: it’s not really that person! That person is holding up a psychological mirror for me. It’s me! It’s my brain chemistry. It’s my mental filtering system. It’s all subjective, and in that sense, it’s all imaginary.

Of course, our romantic traditions don’t conceive or portray it that way. Most depictions of romance show men and women swooning over someone. “You drive me crazy,” we’re conditioned to think. “You are so gorgeous!” “You make me feel so good.” Yadda, yadda, yadda.

This phenomenon has become more intriguing to me as I age and can reflect on my life experience. I see more and more of my existence as symbolic interaction. Visions I pick up outside of me, whether a photo, movie, or something else my eyes see, stimulates an inner part of my psyche. Much of the time it has nothing to do with the actual person and everything to do with my internal life.

The act of writing a love letter is usually thought of as an attempt to woo, persuade, enchant or in some other way influence another person. Many people write love letters out of the hope that they will get something back, be it adoration, a sensual reward, praise, or “winning” someone’s heart.

Yet apart from all that is the reality that in writing a love letter, the writer is primarily playing with his or her own inner universe. The writer is playing with symbolic interaction and conditioning. It’s often an ego thing. We sing the praises of someone outside of ourselves, having decided that winning that person’s heart or gaining that person’s approval would boost our life, our esteem, even our status.

Why is this important?

Have you ever been in love and lost? Have you ever felt that your life was ruined because someone you adore doesn’t feel the same way about you? Have you ever felt really lousy because you feel empty and alone? Have you ever spent your life in what seems like an endless quest to get someone’s approval?

I’ve been through all these situations. They and many more could be soothed quite dramatically if I just stepped back from the drama and realized that most of it was coming from my own head. It’s coming from my own programming and conditioning. The best way to get my power back when I am feeling way out of balance is to remember how much of my reality I am creating.

Emotions charge like speeding locomotives. It’s like a trance. So when I feel myself swept away in a strong surge of negative emotion, I intervene with my intellect. I’ll say to myself something like, “OK, what’s going on here? Why am I so creeped out/pissed off/dejected and lonely?” I will recognize it as a story I am telling myself.

It is said that the outside world mirrors our inside world. If we tell ourselves stories, the external world will attempt to conform to that story. We see what we expect to see. That’s why if we expect to be hurt or betrayed, our external world will bend to help make that happen. Then we can say, “I knew I’d be hurt.”

Symbolic interaction?

If we expect to be hurt, for example, everything we see will appear to be evidence supporting the premise. Everything external will have a symbolic meaning inside. Young jealous lovers often look to their partner’s words, deeds, and activities to see signs of wrong-doing. They’ll look for the slightest instance to blame their lover for being flirtatious or inattentive. The last thing they will do is blame themselves for creating the reality they fear and acknowledge that their suspicious nature colors their every thought.

No, this does not mean that if someone cheats on you, you created it. But it is to say that we have a lot more control over our reality than we are led to believe. People seem to be a lot happier when they look to what’s good and right in their lives. Feeling grateful for what you like is the best way to invite more of the same.

I like to play with my internal world. Sometimes I will see a photo of someone and I will become such an emotional softy from it that I want to write that person a mushy love letter. I may know the person but these days usually not. The love letter I want to write is based on the feelings and fantasies the photo brings up for me, and the process of writing is my way of playing with those feelings. It has nothing to do with wanting to make anything happen in real life outside of the creative joy of letter writing.

It is also wonderful to know that when I do write love letters to people in photos, I am writing to an internal part of me that is reflected in the vision. It’s no different that if I were to write a love letter to a photo of a beautiful cloudscape or water scene. Hey, that’s a pretty good idea.

As are many people, I am saddened by the recent suicides of gay teens.

Being gay is just one flavor of being different. I wish it were more commonly known and appreciated that there are so many ways to be different.

I have found it quite ironic that we who live in America and think of the US as the “land of the free” have a peculiar intolerance for people who are different. That’s a bit absurd when there are so many flavors of difference.

People young and old tend to focus on the one or two areas where they are the most different. Often they obsess on these differences and use them as a means of self-punishment.

I have had an uncanny ability in my lifetime to hang out with a lot of different people. This could include such stereotypes as nerds, gays, lesbians, fatties, polyamorists, hippies, near-death experiencers, unpopular kids at school, celebrities, artists, sex workers, religious fundamentalists, and basically the “fruits and nuts” of Northern California as the popular expression went.

Of course, to my mind stereotypes don’t mean much because everyone is unique. Everyone is a composite of different characteristics and predispositions. It’s common to lump all people together, such as all gays think alike, when clearly that’s not true.

I have spent hours upon hours in various workshops and intimate conversations with people who were greatly bothered if not traumatized by their special brand of being different. It is sad to see so many people with such diversified differences feel so similarly weird, alienated, alone, and unloved. We’re really all in the same boat, although most of us don’t recognize that.

Of course, the problem comes when we listen to other people who do not appreciate our flavor of being different. Often, the people who criticize us the most are people whose role is supposed to be a support person like a parent, priest, or teacher. This gets extended out to God and Country and is communicated to us by proxy. So, for example, if parents and preachers condemn a kid for being gay, or virtually anything else, the withhold of love and approval cuts to the core. Some religious people imply that God hates gay people and the laws often make it criminal.

With all our technology and know-how, we as a society should spend more time and attention helping people feel better about who they are, about the blessings of individuality. I think we must recognize that so much of our mass entertainment is based on deriding, ridiculing, and shaming people who are different. The superstars of news, opinion, and even religion often pit one group against another, playing demographic favorites that market research tells them is the right move. If it’s popular to bash gays, they’ll do that. If it’s popular to call near-death experiences psychotic fantasies, they’ll do that.

So much of our economy is based on using fear to stimulate buying products and services. Commercials constantly tell us that we won’t live happily (ever after) if we don’t have what they’re selling. I did not realize the extent of all the negative messages bombarding me until I quit watching commercial television and got a new perspective.

Ultimately, however, everyone who feels bad for feeling different for whatever that difference is has to find his or her own way out. That, I have come to believe, is part of the spiritual challenge we all take on. While we might easily be able to point our fingers at people who damned us, shamed us, or beat us down, the ultimate responsibility to rebound is ours alone. Don’t wait for the world to change.

Learn to appreciate the differences you have as part of your unique gifts and blessings. Being different does not make you wrong or inadequate. You are the ultimate authority on what is right for you. A Facebook friend describes her transformation this way:

“When I judged myself as being different, I made myself wrong. I was rejecting me and judging me saying I am wrong for being who I am…different. I was not loving and accepting me for being me and I felt bad, unloved, not accepted, and I didn’t feel I belonged or fit in. As I began to love and accept myself more, others changed in response to my changes in myself. Others are just a reflection of what is inside of you that they are mirroring back to you!”

When you accept and love yourself for who you are, the negative voices drop away and you find yourself attracting people into your life who get you.

Using fear to sell victory-over-fear? Huh?

I love the law of attraction. It makes great sense. It makes great philosophy. It makes a great lifestyle.

But I have become increasingly dismayed at how marketers have been using it to sell their workshops and wares. For something as beautiful as the law of attraction and the whole idea that the universe and its Creator support us in whatever we want to do, the sales pitches that turn this magic into run-of-the-muck fear marketing make my flesh crawl.

I don’t really know what to do about this conflict. Sometimes I find myself not buying into a coaching program or consciousness product because I am offended by the marketing for it.

If the law of attraction is real, it says a lot about a wondrous universe. It says that anyone can learn how to think and grow rich. By rich I am not so much referring to cold cash as I am to living a richly fulfilling life. A rich life might include such things as plentiful laughter, the joys of awe and wonder, sensual bliss, intimate emotional connection with others, and spiritual inspiration.

Yet it is with a gnawing foreboding that I observe so many Internet marketers turning the law of attraction into a product they can sell. It’s a bit like selling air. Like air, the law of attraction is already free.

Many of these marketers make reference to “The Secret,” which was this generation’s reiteration of an ancient technology that has often surfaced through the years under different names. Their line goes, “You loved ‘The Secret’ but found out that it just doesn’t work for you. Well, we (in our infinite wisdom) know what they left out … and it’s yours for the awesome price of $XXX if you order within the next 24 hours. If you miss it, pity the underwear you walk in.”

Which is a bit like, “Yes, God gave us all free air, but some people don’t know how to breathe right, and they’re wasting their lives away unnecessarily. We figured out how to breathe right and we’re willing to sell you our secrets for less than the price of a Volvo.”

They sell with fear because it works

To me so much law-of-attraction marketing still uses age-old fear tactics to sell products. One main reason why this is so is that fear just plain works better than positive inspiration. Marketers watch their bottom lines. Responses to their fear-based sales pages make more money than not scaring people. So, they end up using fear to sell you a product that is supposed to be about ridding your life of fear and attracting success.

Another reason for so much fear is that many law-of-attraction marketers don’t produce their own advertising media. They hire seasoned copywriters to create their ads, sales pages, and email campaigns for them. Professional copywriters are steeped in marketing traditions backed up by tons of research, focus groups, and financially proven success formulas. Professional copywriters are sales writers more than metaphysical philosophers. They want to deliver to the hands that pay them the product that will deliver more sales and more income.

If you subscribe to the email lists of different law-of-attraction marketers, you’ll see pretty much the same approach across the board. I think that’s primarily because even if the product is heightened consciousness, the sales techniques are still old school. They do lots of typographical shouting when closing deals and enticing new customers to jump onboard the next cruise.

Selling myself

I learned something else as a customer of consciousness programs and products. What I am actually buying is a vision, and I am the entity generating that vision. I am selling myself.

When someone gives me a sales pitch on all the stuff I am going to learn or accomplish doing it their way, my own brain imagines everything. They may say that they will give me all the step-by-step techniques to learn how to live the life beyond my wildest dreams. My own brain takes their suggestions and forms mental pictures of the great lessons I will learn–even before I know what those lessons are.

My brain imagines how in-depth and right-on their techniques will be. I think of how complete and bulletproof I would be if I wrote the instructional materials. I also imagine how those techniques worked for these people. If I like the sellers, my own brain sets them up as experts who’ve got a lot to teach me.

Self-selling is not just about responding to marketers. Projection like this happens no matter what topic area you’re imagining. When politicians tell you how great or how rotten the future is going to be, it’s still you taking their words and imagining the goodness or badness. When religious figures tell you about the cosmos, it’s still your imagination filling in all the blanks and making all the pictures.

The law of attraction has another interesting (and sometimes bothersome) feature. A built-in plank of the platform is that if you imagine failure in any form, you’re automagically bringing doom to yourself. Any critical thinking is self-defeating. If you think about what you don’t have, you won’t get what you long for.

Over the years oppressive political and religious groups have said, “Just follow what we tell you to do. Don’t criticize us and you’ll be fine.” Of course, frequently in the past that party line was backed up by bloody violence. “Don’t criticize us and we won’t torture you.”

Many law of attraction marketers are keen on selling the idea that your brain sabotages your success. Your negative thinking (including saying no to their product) ruins your life. “You’re saying no to [my product] because unconsciously you don’t want to heal. Fear is keeping you stuck.”

They use fear about your fear to motivate you. They plant the idea, and your brain pictures how they are going to heal you.

The bottom line

Despite what you may conclude from my words, I still believe that the law of attraction is a great way to live. Think about what you want in your life and don’t think about what you don’t want or don’t have. It makes great sense. I also support law of attraction coaches who sell programs that are in harmony with, well, the law of attraction.

I resist any more jumping on board various Internet bandwagons sold with fear messages. Maybe I am sacrificing my chance to own a mansion, sail on my yacht, and have servants do my bidding. (Yawn.) Maybe my brain is shooting me in the foot. The truth is I don’t know. I do know that fear marketing tactics don;t attract me.

I want to use the law of attraction to create and attract love and beauty. My take on it is that as a spiritual law, it must fit into the question of what are we doing on this planet in the first place. It’s a negative-positive, dualistic place. We get pain; we get pleasure. We learn from how we handle our thinking habits. We can swing negative or positive, half empty or half full. The experiences that we take away from living in this dualistic place help our souls grow.

What will you be looking for?

(Disclaimer: If creative speculation about the Universe and its religious icons is offensive to you, fair warning, this may not be your cup of tease.)

After seeing all the televised death and destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then way too much coverage of hurricanes, earthquakes, and other disasters, I’ve wondered where the cavalry is. I’m not talking about FEMA or the National Guard; I’m talking divine intervention.

Many of us wonder how God—assuming there is one—fits into this picture. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does our holy parentage let so much suffering happen? Is anyone in charge paying attention?

Unlike many people who ponder these questions, I don’t have certified answers. I only have divine inspiration swishing through my neurons. I like running different scenarios through my head about how certain history-making, paradigm-flipping events would play out.

What would it look like if Jesus came into town to warn the populace about an impending disaster—another killer hurricane, earthquake, tsunami, tornado, war, alien invasion, or subliminal cable TV broadcasts?

Most likely, no one would take him seriously (although they might seriously consider finding him psychiatric help.) You’ve got millions of people who fervently believe in a guy who wouldn’t get any credence in modern society unless he first performed a bevy of stupid pet tricks to prove his holy credentials.

“In three weeks, a killer hurricane will wipe out 900 square miles of Florida. You’d better leave your house and head north.”

“Yeah, right, Bud. Pass the Twinkies.”

Have you ever wondered just how would the masses recognize a divine savior anyway? What if s/he does not return in a recognizable form as a white guy with long hair, beard, robe, and stylish Birkenstocks?

I enjoy thinking of Christ returning in the body of a rotund wheelchair-bound black female. There’s great irony about how that would fly here in the USA. While I do believe that many people would quickly adapt to the game-changer, feeling the authenticity of the message with their hearts, I think that many others would respond with skepticism and suspicion in the extreme.

Just having Christ return in a female body would be a wild game-changer, too. I don’t see much discussion about this, but I do at times wonder about the psychological dynamics of sex and spiritual leadership. What role does sexual attraction play in spiritual motivation? If Christ returned as a sexy woman (in however you choose to define the term sexy,) how would that change things? How would women respond to a same-sex savior? How would men respond to an other-sex savior?

If the iconic male Jesus returned, would he go through an image make-over, starting with a shave and haircut? It’s still an enigma to me how most men who praise Jesus wouldn’t be caught dead grooming and dressing like him.

Would a modern Jesus convert to designer labels? Would all his clothes be custom? Would he make/sell corporate endorsements? Would he chant a slogan? “Got God?” “M’m, m’m, God!” “Just say God!”

Would Jesus pay attention to opinion polls? If the critical masses didn’t like his classic appearance, would he flip-flop and conform to the standard the focus group loved? Would he hire a cadre of spin doctors and image consultants and writers and photographers?

How much of what many people consider success symbols or living the good life would a modern Jesus embrace? Would s/he buy a snazzy car and live in a multi-million dollar showplace estate? Would s/he eat at the finest gourmet restaurants and travel to all the famous global destinations? Would s/he be seen schmoozing with all the movers and shakers in the modern world?

Or would being the Daughter/Son of God place different genes in Christ’s body, making him or her indifferent to much of what currently flies as status?

If Christ popped into earth life one day, who would get him/her on a talk show first? Oprah? Katie Curic? Rush Limbaugh? Howard Stern? Would the production team that succeeded in making that happen then try to capitalize on it. “We got Jesus! You got us!”

One great advantage of having Jesus appear on talk shows is that he could finally speak for himself rather than having someone telling me what he says.

Reverend Pat Robertson proclaims, “Well, Jesus says—”

“No, I don’t,” Jesus retorts.

“Well, it’s written in the Bible.”

“I’ve evolved since then.”

Wouldn’t that be a riot?

Meanwhile, I have to wonder if divine presence would warrant freedom from commercials? Or would we hear this: “Jesus explains how he’ll save our planet right after these messages from major multi-national corporations who are raping and destroying our planet. Don’t go away.”

These days, the big names in cosmic woo-woo use tons of marketing help in spreading their spiritual answers. They are light industries. I get woozy thinking of the fees that the bona fide Son of God could charge for a “Conversations with Dad” Seminar, especially if earthly greed kicked in.

I also wonder how Christ would respond to the current state of religion and politics. In my heart of hearts, I can’t see Jesus being wildly pleased with the evil that has been perpetrated in his name. Would he still be welcome in Love It Or Leave It Land if he opined that war is not the answer? Indeed, what if he thought it was a really bad idea—as love thy enemy suggests? “What about ‘Thou shalt not kill’ don’t you understand?”

And what ruckus would transpire if Jesus announced that same-sex marriages were fine with the Higher Authority, the Big HA? What if he blessed any kind of intimate behavior as a gift of spiritual opportunity?

Just in case you’re wondering, the only Jesus that I know is the one I feel inside me, the one who comes through my imagination. I think it is up to each of us to make that decision for ourselves. I suppose I could reach Heaven’s Induction Center and be shocked to learn that the religious right was right after all. “God loves you, but where did you get the crazy idea that He loves unconditionally? He thinks just like Pat Robertson, and Pat Robertson wants you to toast!”

Nonetheless, I wonder what will happen when the cavalry arrives. Talk about a media frenzy.

How do you think you would recognize Christ if S/He appeared here on Earth in your lifetime?