Perception vs Reality

Last night we watched the 2003 A Wrinkle in Time. While I can't really say that it's as good as the book, which seems to be the case 99% of the time, there were a few good parts to the movie. One of them was when Meg is with Aunt Beast and Meg comes to the realization that what is and what seems to be are different. So often in life we get distracted from what is by what seems to be. This is true in all areas of life. For example, when I start to worry about money and where it will come from I've been distracted by the perceived lack in the world. When I am able to clear the fog of perception with the realization of reality then all worry and concern is dispelled. The reality of life is that there is abundance available to us all. The fact is that there is more than enough for everyone. That's it...Inspiration wasn't really here at this moment, I was forcing myself to write. I have something I want to write about but it is resting in the corner of my mind for the moment. When it awakens I'll revise this post.

Patriarchal Blessings...Solidifying Identity

I was reading last night from Tony Robbins' Awaken the Giant Within (you can get it used for 79 cents! Dang! I paid 14 bucks! If you do buy this book, it may be worth it to pay for a new one so you don't have to stare at Tony's 80's photo...kind of disturbing.< /twobits>) about identity. He was saying that how we identify ourselves determines which resources we tap into in our reservoir of capacity. It's chapter 18 for those who want to follow along ;). His theory is that we can change a lot about our actions and behaviors simply by adjusting our identity, or rather who we see ourselves as being. The basis for his theory is that because being consistent is so important to American/Western culture that we will do whatever we must to be consistent with the identity we have adopted. He sited the example of Jean Valjean from Les Miserables, among others. So...What does any of this have to do with Patriarchal Blessings? Everything. Before I go any further we need to be on the same page. I guess if you don't have the same presuppositions, you'll still prove my theory correct, but if you want the best result you should be on the same page.

Presupposition #1: A patriarchal blessing is an inspired blessing from God representing the potential He sees in you.

Presupposition #2: God can not lie.

Presupposition #3: A patriarchal blessing is not a declaration of what must happen, but rather what could happen if you accept it as being inspired and accept the content as a guide.

Shoot! That about sums it up. If you can accept your patriarchal blessing as being God's view of what your life could be (your identity) then the likelihood of your blessing becoming reality is huge. Conversely, (this is for those who say patriarchal blessings are bogus) if you don't buy that your blessing is inspired by God then I'll make my own prophesy...at the end of your life you'll be able to say with some confidence that the whole thing was bogus since none of it happened. That's the wonder of it all. God, in His infinite wisdom, knows that we respond to suggestion. He doesn't MAKE us do what He says we can do...He suggests it to our mind and soul with His words in the scriptures and more specifically to us via a patriarchal blessing. He doesn't tell you everything you have to do, just those things that we might not be inclined to do if left to our own desires. Awesome. And if we reject His view of what we could be and do, it is our choice. It serves to our own condemnation (I view condemnation as meaning: con=with , -demnation=state of impeded progress or damned...to be in a state of impeded progress.). And the resulting false sense of reality will further impede our progress. It's not until we can acknowledge with humility that results we find in our lives today is the result of what we imagined it could be that we will be able to set a new course by finding a higher identity and as a result tap into more of that latent capacity that lays outside the realm of our perceived abilities. That's all...for now.

Service as a Principle

Trent introduced me to a speaker named Eric Lofholm. Trent let me borrow an audio CD of his seminar and I was quite happy with what I heard. The guy was talking exactly about what I have been thinking about for a while. In fact it went along with a little article I wrote a couple of weeks back. It was about quality vs. quantity as an inital focus for a business. In the seminar he talked about how you have to focus on providing value for the customer and compensation will come. That is in contrast to focusing on the sales and the money and maybe you'll occasionally provide some value to a customer. The reason I loved it is because it's so true and at many levels. While he was talking primarly about sales, the principle of focusing on meeting the needs of others is what I'd call an eternal principle. It goes along with the scripture, "For that which ye do send out shall return unto you again..." If I focus on 'sending out' what others are looking for, or providing real value, I'll always receive an abundance of what I need. However, if I always focus on what I need first to the neglect of what others need I'll never be able to fully meet my needs. That's it. No if's and's or but's. In fact, I'm so confident that if someone will apply this principle to their life that they will have all their needs met in time that I'd challenge anyone to try it. I'll put up my article on True Industry's website tomorrow on Quality or Quantity As A Business Focus for those who are interested.

The Pride Wave

So the other day in Sunday School the teacher was talking about the children of Israel and how they were in this Cycle of rebellion and the resulting misery followed by humility, repentance and the corresponding happiness. I got to thinking about that. For me it is helpful to use graphical representations to identify patterns in life, but a cycle just didn't do it for we because it isn't dynamic enough. So I got to thinking ...What would be more expressive of this pattern in my life? I wanted time to have a bigger more dynamic representation and stills allow for differences in sin and repentance. So I thought about how if you put a dot on a tire and rolled it then graphed the dot's location you would end up with a wave. A wave would be flexible enough to give a more realistic representation of this life pattern. This is what came to me: Some Explanation: (I guess I could have used Illustrator or something like that to make some better graphics but I'm using a tablet PC without much software.) Happiness is on top, as it should be, we approach true happiness as we align ourselves with good principles or in other words, God's will. As we rebel and try to do things "our" way or in otherwords, sin, we fall away from true happiness and head toward real misery. As a quick aside, I take the large percentage of people addicted to alcohol, smoking or other drugs as indication of individuals who are trying to escape from something very real. This real misery can lead people to humility which can prompt them to repent or realign themselves with God's will. That is the base path shown by the blue wave. However, my experience and observation would say that we rarely follow the entire propagation of the wave. More common is the red or green path. The 'I get it' or ' I don't get it yet' waves. The red wave is typical of those that fall in sin and either don't want to change or don't know how to change. I would imagine that those who have addictions would have a life pattern similar to this one. The green wave is typical of those that 'get it'. I'm always impressed by these people. They are all over the place. You can find them in every nation. Finally you will see the close up view of the blue line. This is meant to represent that as we go through life there are many levels of waves. On a daily basis our direction (up or down) changes as does the amount of time we spend in happiness and misery and the degrees of each we experience. The reason this is helpful for me is it allows me to visualize with greater clarity my position and course in relation to God's will. My hope is to spend more time in alignment and the accompanying peace. I would imagine that by identifying sin indicators (those feelings or events that accompany the beginning stages of dissociating from happiness) one could set up in advance patterns which would facilitate course correction (i.e. repentance). Ok... that's it for now. Maybe if anyone reads this and has comments I'll get some more insight one the topic and write more or even re-draw the graphics in Illustrator.

Breakin' Out

I know...It's crazy. I'm writing again well before the deadline. But sometimes you just got to type. <>I just can't believe the nerve some Webmaster have. I mean, are there really that many idiots that like to find a page full of old search engine results pretending to be fresh and valuable content??? I think that's the biggest challenge with the internet today. All the dorks that just cram it full of trash. Page after page of useless garbage and they make dynamic garbage too! They'll serve up a freshly made page, just for you, of useless information. The next best thing is the same content served out to thousands of websites as a 'service' to the end user. < /rant > So, it's a great day. I get to spend some time with my children as my wife is out of town. I can't even begin to describe how great they are. I just feel lucky that I was blessed with them. It is a constant battle to stay focused on the most important things in life. Some what related to that...I was listening to Michael Savage on the radio as I was waiting for my daughter to finish soccer practice yesterday, and he was just rambling about a book he read when he was 18. And he paraphrased the author about life and how those that take casually what everyone else focuses on constantly do better or something like that. It started me thinking about how stressing out about things never seems to make them better. Not to say that not taking care of business is a solution, but rather taking care of business and not stressing about it is way more productive. I'm not going to look it up right now by Christ said that you can't change the color of your hair by worrying about it. I've always took that to mean that worry and stress don't effect change, rather action and faith (and I suppose that's redundant being that faith is belief mixed with action) combined bring about results. Yet, even knowing that, I still find my self constantly fighting against worry and stress. Funny how that works. Everything seems to naturally flow to decay without the constant tending to maintenance.

OK, It has been 38 days...

I can add another post. ;) I'm pretty sure that's the rule. I know I have seen quite a few blogs breaking it unabashedly, but I have to stick to my principles! I think I made the title of my blog a bit to philosophical. It works for the occasional post but day to day, you can only write so much about what one ought to do. Most of the time is to be spent doing. I totally understand at least one facet of the Sabbath day commandment. It is so refreshing to take one day a week and leave all my cares and worries in the office. Don't get me wrong, my work isn't horrible nor my cares and worries, but it still is nice to enjoy some ponderation on the more lasting parts of life, which happily includes my family! Sometimes I wish that we could enjoy this life forever, because it is so much fun to associate with one another. But then I remember that the eternities will be all this and more, so I'll take what I have and enjoy it for the time I have. I suppose my biggest regrets are my many and varied imperfections. Yet even those serve me quite well to keep me tuned into my constant need for my Savior's atoning grace. ...ha ha... I was just thinking about how guarded my entries are. I love to hit the theoretical, the general and the philosophical because it puts some distance between myself and what I write. Oh boy, what fun...

Just Get Started

It's quite amazing to me how easy it is to work on preparation way too long. I'm not knocking preparation...my point is that I've seen too many people delay real action in the name of preparation. Before they launch the company, before they start working, before, before, before! Delaying getting started for fear of everything being less than perfect. I guess there's something to be said for Google's starting quickly (even if it's not perfect). Honestly I can't even remember where I heard it, but the whole idea is to prepare as is necessary, but then get started. Fail yourself to success if you have to, but get started. Most things in life are not learned in the preparation phase. It's in the doing, the trying, the failing, that we learn the real lessons. I suppose that's why there's repentance worked into the whole scheme of things. Because you can't but help mess up. But in the picking yourself up, reevaluating your method and trying again that you really learn. The one thing I can't but help wonder is how many times do you need to make the same mistake before you can't learn anything else from it? Anyway, that's the mantra for the day...Just Get Started! If things don't go right...adjust. If the plan fails...rework it. Don't wait to get started until your plan is exactly perfect, or the product is perfect, or the sales pitch is perfect. Do, try, learn, improve. Oh! That reminds me I need to stretch.

12 Years

I think it was almost twelve years ago that I first 'got' the concept and I use the term 'got' loosely since I appearently don't 'got' it down yet. I think his name was Bishop Kyle. He said, "Ryan, always keep the little rules and you'll never have any trouble with the big ones." I went to Rio de Janeiro for the next two years and did my best to follow that council. When I returned to the States my parents had just been introduced to a company called TPN by some family friends. The president of the company, Jeff Olsen, always liked to talk about the Slight Edge. Basicly the same deal...just worded differently. He would say it along these lines...There is a slight edge, a razors edge if you will, of difference between the people who do great things and those that don't. Those that do great things do the simple things that don't seem to make any difference in the act of doing them, but the compounded effect over time yields huge results. Then more likely then not, Mr. Olsen would talk about flying a jet and how it makes a million tiny corrections during the flight to keep on course. Then things start jumping out at you like this verse of scripture "...by small and simple things are great things brought to pass..." and "…do not let us be slothful because of the easiness of the way..." I think the most interesting thing is that you could share this simple principle with just about anyone and they'd say, "Yeah, of course that's true...it's kind of obvious." Yet, I see myself slipping up way to much considering what I know. I really think it's because it's so obvious and because it's so subtle. So why do I neglect to do the simple things that make all the difference? Laziness. I think that about sums it up. What is it? The second law of thermodynamics? The natural tendency of things is to break down. I have the hardest time when I let that law rule my life. The hopeful part is that it's not permanent yet and I have time to adjust my course. Recently (as in today), I've been thinking that if I can keep enough focus on the basic three things I need to do to step over that edge, the small rules and then get them so ingrained that they become part of who I am, then I can begin to focus on a new set of three and so on and so forth until I really start to put the rubber to the road. Hey this journaling thing is helpful!