I'm not feeling well today, we have been having some trouble getting along.  Something in the stars.  The maid is here and I just want her to leave so I can be at peace.  I know I am wrong to feel this way, but I just cannot relax when she is here.  It is wrong of me to feel this way, but it is the truth.

I don't have any idea what to write about.  The words seem to be coming but I do not have any idea where they are going. I have not been very good about keeping to a routine of writing everyday.  I think it has probably been well over a week since my last entry.  Not a lot of traffic either.  I guess this is a good lesson in how not to write a blog.

But this really is a diary that is open for public viewing more than a blog.  I'm not really asking anybody to read it, and certainly not expecting a lot of traffic.  Maybe there is some small part of my ego that wants to believe that these musings are special in some way and that they will go viral, but that is not true.  These words are just more words in a see of words.  I wonder if there are more words in the internet than there are stars in the galaxy.  A word for every star.  There are five more stars.

I have been having a little battle with codependency.  Also with my auto correct.  But the codependency is more interesting to me anyway.  When she gets upset, that vibration invades my vibration and I get upset to.  She says I create drama when she is just trying to deal with her feelings in a healthy way.  I can see that my reaction to her feeling bad is not a healthy one, but there does not seem to be much I can do about it.

Things in life are moving fast, yet staying the same as they ever were.  December is here already.  I am about a million miles from where I was last December.  One year ago today I did not even know her.  I was just back from Thanksgiving.  I was still in the ugly part of ending my relationship with N.  I was about to move into a new house, and I thought my future was in that direction.  I needed that house to start my relationship with S, but was only there for eight months.

So here it is the turn of November, and the full moon just past.  I am living in a gorgeous condominium and we just got a new car.  I had breakfast with George today.  Yesterday I helped my mother hang a chandelier out by the fish pond.  The new car is really sweet.  I sent a letter a week ago to rejoin the yacht club. I just checked out the bike locker room, and there is plenty of space in it.  We are thinking about getting some paddle boards so we can use them in the bay!  What a lot of fun that will be.

Less than three months to go until the wedding.  The invitations are being designed.  We still have not seen the prenup yet.  Tonight we are supposed to go to a slow foods event.  I don't think either of us are much looking forward to it. Good to be supportive though.  Sit down seats, so we better show up.

The house feels quite.  Maybe the maid is gone.  I'm going to go check.

So now it's 4:20, about four hours later.  I did a nice meditation and then I took a nap.  I feel a bit better.  I took some medicine for my stomach and gut, and I think it did the trick.

you are really beating yourself up about your job.  You do not even realize how much of your energy this stress is sucking from you.  It need not be this way.  You are unhappy with the situation because it causes you to judge yourself as inadequate.  You are defending yourself against what you think is criticism of your performance and then you are translating that into a criticism of your own self worth.

There is some truth to their concern after all.  You actually are not working very hard.  The reasons for this are the reasons for it, and your stories about those reasons really do not mean anything.  You think a lot about the VF transaction and you have arguments in your head with G and W and R about this transaction.  I these arguments you explain why you think you should share in the comission.  You have fantasies of inciting GV from MSSB into a confrontation with P management, and you imagine that in this conflict you will somehow be vindicated.  Of course none of that has any reality.  Maybe G is not even being paid a commission.  Maybe he is, maybe he isn't.  The reality is you do not know the truth.

The other reality is the soccer dad ref syndrome.  How many parents call foul when a call is in their favor?  We feel strongly not because of justice, but because of attachment to outcome.  You are attached to the outcome of the situation with G, and so you tell a story that assuages your feelings of injustice over the situation as it develops.

What this ignores is the basic reality that you create all of your experience yourself.  You have had glimpses of this, but you have not really learned it as of yet.  You have fears that your marriage with S will not be completed and you fear you will be caste out and helpless if that comes to pass.  This is another terrible fantasy.  You love S very much and you know she feels the same about you.  You have earned and have been granted a true gift and opportunity, and this kind of fear based thinking will rob you of the benefit of this gift.  You live in your mind.  Keep it clean.

Meditate every day.  You have been given time every day.  Use it to meditate and exercise.  Use it to make the best of your life.  It is a gift and you need not fritter it away on guilt.  Celebrate this time with your mother.  Get to know S's family  Spend time in prayer and with your church.  Prepare yousrelf for your mission, bcause it is already well under way.

You have tapped into that feeling in your heart that is where your little self hides in pain and fear.  release that.  It is not you.  You are a powerful creator.  There is only one consciousness, and of it you are a part.  There is no difference between you and your brothers because you are all the product of the same consciousness.  Everything that exists in this material world you perceive is and extension of the one consciousness, and just as you can change your mind, so you create the world.  How to remember who you are?  The first step is to recognize the dream.  The second step is to remember the dreamer.  Adam fell asleep.  Nowhere does it say that he woke up.

I have been feeling a call to apply for a job at the University.  I went onto their website today, and it appears that they have tons of opportunities to get involved.  I looked into rolls at the legal and financial departments, nad nothing there looked like very much fun.  I then went ot the section on faculty and there were lots of opportunities as a guest lecturer or junior professor.  I wonder what it would take to get on a tenure track.  I would probably have to publish or something like that.  Maybe I would have to earn a Phd.

That would be kind of fun to go back to school.  I wanted to write for ahlf an hour today, and I want to connect to my inner voice.  But I am not feeling much inspiration.

The first thing you must do is start oworking on your resume.  You will never find a position if you do not do this.  So this is your fisrt step.  Also you have had a couple of people put into your life who will be able to assist you in finding the right answer.  The University is a good place to start.  Faculty is the path.  The key is that by joining the faculty you can promote your personal theme.

My personal theme is that The Expansion of the Consciousness will be able to save the earth.  When you say this you are aware that the earth is really in no danger from humanity.  If you destroy your habitat and disappear, in a million or ten million or a hundred million years, there will be no trace on this earth that you evr existed.  So really the only earth you need to worry about saving is the earth as it exists during your time on it.  You simply need to worry about saving your own experience of the earth.  But with that understanding, you mcan accurately say that it is only the expansion o fthe consciousness that will be able to save the earth.

For you to promote this basic theory as your mission, you can find a role for yourself as a teacher.  You have resonated with the teachings in A Course in Miracles relating to the student teacher relationship.  You have thought about being a teacher and you have a lot of experience teaching from your role as a father.  You can take the love you have for humanity and translate this into an expansion of consciousness by teaching and by assisting the University in fulfilling it's mission to teach.

You are competent to teach classes in the Philosophy of Law and you are competent to teach classes in business law, ethics, and Law and Economics.  Your time line is to establish a date for lunch and then finish your resume so that you can bring it with you.  You should also contact your mother to have her put you in touch with the person you want to speak to.  It is time to start the ball rolling because your position will be coming to an end very shortly.  It is important for you to start moving in the right direction.

you have worked hard for a period of twenty five years.  You are having a respite right now, but it is not to last for a long time.  It is time for you to get engaged in what you are doing.

So I missed my trip to New York today.  My flight was cancelled because of the second storm.  Someone told me that some astronomical event that occurred in Gemini with the Mercury Retrograde would bring things, such as the storm, in a pair.  So my flight was cancelled and so were all of the other flights yesterday afternoon.

I could have flown on Delta this morning at 6:00 and made it just in time for the conference, but I really did not want to go.  If the universe gives you a sign as powerful as a Nor'easter, does it not make sense to listen?

I went to the doctor yesterday and he told me my blood pressure was high.  This is not the first time this has happened.  So I'm going to kick caffeine for a week and then go back to the Doctor.  I will see if caffeine has some effect on my blood pressure.  I suspect it might.  I am also getting back into an exercise routine.  I ran yesterday in the park and today my calves are paying for it.  I should go and get my bike today and take it out to the key for a ride.  I have not done that in a long time.  I wonder if my bike will fit in my car.

the things you need to write will come to you if you just listen to them and stop with the judging.  You are afraid to write the words you receive because you judge them.  this is a continuation of your concern with the reader.  REally you know that you do not have much of an audience.  So why are you worried about what they think?  YOu have not imposed any of this writing upon anyone.  YOu have not asked anyone to read it nor have you suggested that you think your efforts in woriting this are worthy of anyone else's attention.  You have to learn to be careful when you write.  You tend to want to do this with no effort, as if the words can flow from your fingers like a waterfall.

The words will come, but it is up to you to have the patience and the intention to put them on the paper in the correct manner.  As soon as your mind wanders, this connection is broken.  As soon as you question what you are writing, the channel is blocked.  See how you can regain the connection by letting go of the judgments of your mind.  These blocks are the same as the resistance to change that prevents you from accepting the abundance that the world offers you.

You are worried that you will not have everything you need despite obvious evidence to the contrary.  You have been alive for 45 years and you have never gone without anything that you have needed.  You have shut yourself off from love, and you have looked for it in places where it could not be found, but that does not mean it was not there surrounding you all of the time.

this is a joyous time in your life.  You should celebrate it and enjoy it.  You have been given all that you have asked for, yet you continue to worry about your career.  Your career at PNC is coming to an end, because you want it to come to an end.  Rather because you want to stop struggling.  You have struggled for your entire adult life. Not because struggling was necessary, but because you imposed this upon yourself.  Your struggle is over right now, just as it was over every day.

Your decision to cancel your trip to New York was an honest acknowledgement of what you did not want.  You did not want to force that trip, and you listened to this internal guidance.  You can be congratulated for that, because your pattern would be to ignore this and trudge ahead on a trip that you did not feel like going on.

This feeling I am speaking of is your emotional barometer.  It will tell you where your true path lies.  When you force yourself in a direction contrary to your true path, you feel disharmony within you and this leads to stress and unhappiness.  If you want to heal your heart and your blood pressure, this is where you must do your work.

You do not like having Alma in the apartment, and this has nothing whatsoever to do with Alma.  It has everything to do with your judgment of yourself.  You look at yourself through what you imagine to be her eyes.  What does she think of you sitting in the apartment?  What does she think of you writing on the computer or reading a book?  Does she think you should not be doing these things?  Does she think you should be doing something else? Why do you care?

You don't really care what Alma thinks at all.  What you really are doing is projecting your own harsh judgments of yourself onto Alma.  It is your voice that says these things about you.  It is you that thinks you should be doing something else, and that is why there is this disharmony inside you.

;You have a voice in your head that wants to argue with W and R about your career.  You want to justify your actions and your position and you feel that they should listen and agree.  There is a wound inside you that this energy is trying to heal, but this healing cannot come from W or R.  Prayer is the answer to this healing.  You are not a lazy person.  You want to work and to fulfill your mission.  But you do not see it right now and so you are paralyzed.You do not go out and seek for a new job because you are still holding on to the old one.

But think this is really not a problem.  You do not really want a new job right now.  You are getting married in February and then you are taking vacation.  You are planning to go to Hawaii with the kids over the summer and maybe to travel to Mapia in June.

Patience and Calm

And so I am sitting here in the living room and I am searching for the voice within me to write on this slate.  I have this feeling tha tthe person for whom I am writing, the audience, is actually myself.  And I feel this block in my chest.  It feels like an energetic block on the left side of my chest at the level of my heart.  It extends to the left from the center into the pit just below my clavicle.  The voice in my head is an argument with W from work about credit for a sales transaction.  I tried to share the situation with Stephanie, but it required so much explanation just to set the foundation that it really was not possible to discuss in detail.

Three years ago we completed a large transaction for a client on the west coast.  This transaction is now being refinanced at a lower interest rate.  There was a big commotion about this because of the "loss" from the reduction in the rate.  However, the transaction now appears on the pipeline as a new transaction with the credit going to the person who covers the northwest.  The voice inside of me says that it should either not be a deal at all, on account of it's being a refinance of an existing transaction, or that I should get credit for having been the source of the client relationship.

And so the arguments and conversations about this topic are whistling through my brain.   What are they protecting?  This is a painful vibration related to my perceived failure to be successful in my job.  This is the same job situation that I have been talking about changing for two years now.  I feel useless professionally right now because I am waiting in this limbo for things to move.  I would like to take proactive control and do something about it, but I am feeling that maybe my lesson is one of patience.

I am in a situation where I really do not have to do much work at all for the next several months, and at the end of that time, my job will be over.  But I struggle with this situation.  I do not want my job to end and so I cling on to it, but it has been such a struggle and it is clear that it is the only thing in my life that has not been transformed.  At some level I fear that a transition in this area will put my relationship with S in jeopardy, but there really is no indication of that aside from my own fear.

And there is the alimony question.  I cannot just resign my job because I have to pay alimony and there would be the threat of being attacked for leaving a job when this obligation has to be met.  I of course cannot expect S to contribute to this obligation while I spend my afternoons on the sofa writing into the ether.

And so here I am.  It is election day.  So much has transpired since the last election day.

I want to feel like I am on my mission.  That I have a function in this world that is part of God's plan.  I want this function to be revealed to me and I want to live it.  But maybe it is that my function is what I do while I'm thinking I should be doing something else.  Isn't that really the issue?  It's not that I have the wrong thing in front of me, it's that I need to let go of the feeling that there must be something else.

Patience and calmness.  Patience.  Calm.  I can hear Paulo Roberto's admonition right now.  The tormentors with their hooks and nets try to pull us from the ladder.  No.  Patience. Calmness.  Align yourself with the higher source.  What are the temptations that are trying to trap me now?  Anger and frustration.  Envy.  Thinking that out there is something I want that belongs to me that is being taken from me.  That I am being taken advantage of.  That it is not fair.  That it would be weak for me not to stand up for myself.  That the spiritual path does not require me to be a push over, a door mat.  Patience. Calm.

Firm yourself in God.  God is the answer.  You do not need anything that they have to give.  They can take nothing from you if you need nothing except what comes from God.  Wylie asked the other day what was the longest I have ever been without a meal.  Was the answer really less than 24 hours?  Have I really lived on this planet for 45 years and never missed a meal? What am I afraid of?  What is it that I think I need?

Patience.  calm.  There is an illumination work in Texas this weekend.  I could fly out on Saturday morning and return Sunday.  I feel a call to do it, but I'm not sure.  The lesson of patience may be simply to stay in my place.

On dreams and awakening

So why do I always check my statistics before I post a new entry?  If I am not writing for an audience, why do I care if anybody is reading this?  I suppose it is natural for a teacher to wonder when he will be granted his students.  That sounds like quite a mouthful does it not?

I have been studying A Course In Miracles for some time now.  About three years to be exact.  It contains a lot of information about what it means to be a teacher and what it means to be a student.  The main thrust of this is that the teacher student relationship is always perfectly reciprocal.  ACIM says that what you teach is what you learn, and so what you see in your students is what you learn about yourself.  And so the teaching and learning relationship is really about looking at your brother or sister and seeing myself reflected there.  The real bottom line is that there is only one consciousness that needs to be awakened.

The expansion of the consciousness will be able to save the earth.  That is my core belief about teaching and learning.  This world that we create is a classroom and the lesson we learn is the expansion of the consciousness.

In dreams I have had recently, upon remembering the dream, I can see that the lesson was I should have recognized in the dream that it was a dream.  One of my dreams was about swimming up a stepped series of rice paddies surrounded by snow with a polar bear and a pool raft.  The polar bear was not dangerous, but he was relatively unconcerned with the mission of swimming up the steps.  I was trying to keep the raft and the bear and the whole production in order and I was trying to move the entire procession up the mountain.  There were other human characters who entered and left the dream.

The dream was so vivid.  So incredibly vivid.  And I remember feeling very strongly the urgency of continuing up the stepped terraces of rice patties.  But at no point did it occur to me that I was in a dream.  And so upon awakening, I remembered this dream, and the lesson I received was that I should have recognized the dream for what it was.

And so there is the rub.  It is exactly that same realization that will awaken us from the state of illusion that we are living in right now.  Yes you too.  You are reading this.  How did that happen?  How strange that you stumbled upon this text.  It appears nowhere in any book or search engine.  It's only purpose is to ask you to ask yourself, am I dreaming now?  And the even deeper level of this, your consciousness and mine are the same.  It is also I that must now ask myself the same question.

So who, in a dream, do we call upon to awaken?  It is our same consciousness right?  Think of a vivid dream that you have experienced recently.  Take your mind back to that moment in the dream and meditate on the feelings that you were having in that dream.  Now imagine that you in that state of dreaming realized that you were in the middle of a dream.  Who would you call upon to awaken?  Where does that being live?  IN another dimension?  Another reality?  Feel the water, touch the polar bear.  Are they not as real as the material in the consciousness you are experiencing now?

So now ask the same question.  If you were right now to realize you are in a dream, who would you call upon to awaken?  You could have this very conversation in a dream and still not realize that it is a dream.  You could read these words and dismiss them as abstractions.  But that's just it.

And so we are called to wake up.

The awakening from a dream does not depend on the resolution of all of the dramas contained in the dream.  Think of a dream of a building with a flood on the bottom and a fire on the top.  Think of the chaos, the lost loved ones, the injuries and the frustration.  These matters do not need to be resolved to wake up.  There is no long process required.  There is no need to tie up the loose ends, to solve the quest, to find the solution.  No, upon awakening, the dream simply dissolves and even if we can remember it, we can see that the whole of it never was.

Now think of your life situation.  You stress about your job, your relationships, the election, the wars, the environmental calamity.  All of this.  Do we need to solve all of this to wake up from the dream?  No.  We just need to wake up.

And so I write this and I come back and I look to see if anyone has read this.  I look to see if anyone had left a comment.  I look to see if there is someone else out there, or in here, who is dreaming the same dream.  That will be my teacher.  That will be my student.  I suppose I look because I want someone to help me wake up, and I guess that's just the long and short of it.

It's Friday morning and I just returned from two back to back convention trips.  These are day erasers.  Standing in a booth greeting strangers, trying to pull them in to talk about banking products.  And so during one of the breaks my boss pulled me aside and confirmed that my job will be coming to an end next year.  The bottom line was I have to move to the company headquarters or else move on to a new company.  It sounds unfair the way I have written it, but it's really not that so much.  Big companies have a hard time with small decisions.  I am a small decision.

Byut I have until January before I have to start looking for something  With the wedding coming up in February, that gives me a pretty fair amount of time.  I told him I would like to have three months from March 1st.  That would be a pretty sweet deal.  It would enable me to stay employed until after my ex wife gets married.  It will enable me to get married myself without having to deal with looking for a new job at the same time.

I voted yesterday.  Beautiful day for it.  I voted for Obama, because I do not like the idea of fascist Romney picking Supreme Court Justices.  Yeah, Fascist.  Any other descripiton is denial of the truth.

There are truths in the world.  Not everything is opinion. Judgment is a projection of our own past experiences onto another person.  We have opinions about fat people, and we see an overweight yoga instructor and think she does not look like a yoga teacher.  She is a yoga teacher, so by definition she looks like one.  That just judgment clouding truth.

Discernment is the ability to determine the truth.  A slender very attractive person who cannot teach yoga cannot teach yoga, appearances to the contrary.  I know, it's a lousy metaphor.  You can fight it or you can learn something from it.

And so it is with the president.  I have heard Romney correct himself and we have seen what he says in private.  You are fooling yourself if you think there is any justification at all for voting for him.  The nice thing about voting for Obama is you don't have to apologize for it.