let us all think...

and where do you dwell?

i dwell in
POSSIBILITY

a single thought...

If you and I
are having a single
thought of
violence or hatred
against
anyone in the
world
at this moment,
we
are contributing
to the
wounding
of
the
world.

ride into reality...

Man,
alone,
has the power to transform
his thoughts
into physical reality;
man,
alone,
can dream
and
make his dreams
come true.

thoughts turning the baby...

i've mentioned several times in this blog the concept of "intention" - obtaining what you want or need by "intending" it - by knowing you can obtain or do whatever it is that you want - that we each create our own reality - another of my own "intention" experiences involves the birth of one of my children - during the delivery process, it was discovered that the baby was breech, then transverse - the doctors did everything possible to get the baby to turn but she was obstinate and would not budge - this meant that i would have to have a c-section - the doctors announced that i would be made ready for surgery and i announced to them that they should all leave my room and not return until i rang the nurses' station - and that i would get my baby to turn - reluctantly, they left, saying they would give me no more than 15 minutes - once i was alone, i closed my eyes, "talked" to my baby and asked her to please turn and visualized her turning herself - within a few minutes i knew that she had and then i rang the nurses' desk - of course, when i was checked, the baby was head down and ready to be born - the natural way -

lynne mctaggart [the intention experiment, pg 139] refers to this kind of result in pregnant women being obtained through "'hypnotic intention', discussing how, in altered states, corresponding to the hyperalert state of intense meditation, conscious thought can convince the physical body of many things"...

i just didn't happen to be hypnotized -

buddha on thought -

All that we are
is the result of
what we have thought.
If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought,
pain follows him.
If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought,
happiness follows him,
like a shadow
that never leaves him.

dream story...

this is a photo of me when i was 15 years old - it's taken at a local park pond where i loved to go whenever i could - the "necklace" is actually a high school senior class ring of my boy friend at the time - XXX was several years older, joined the marines right after HS and was stationed on the west coast when this pic was made - in any event, this time in my life was one of the really extremely intense periods of my being in touch with those "other" senses - you know the ones - those that others think you're weird for having so you don't tell anyone about the dreams you have that come true - the thoughts that happen - but my dreams/thoughts of that kind were so prevalent then that i would write them down with the date of the dream or thought and seal them in an envelope - then i would give them to the one person i trusted - my english teacher who was such a dear friend to me - and when the "event" happened i would ask her to open the envelope and read what i had written before the "event" occurred - several of these experiences involved XXX - in one incident, i dreamed that XXX had been injured in a car crash - it was one of those dreams from which you awaken in a cold sweat not really sure if you're dreaming or not - i wrote my little note about it that day and gave it to my teacher as soon as i got to school - everything went ok that day - no big deal - no news - then, the next day, i was called into the principal's office where my teacher was also - and i was told that XXX had been critically injured in a car accident the night before - in california - he eventually recovered fully -

a christopher and che story...

ok - another christopher story in just the few days he's been visiting - and i just realized that he's only been here since early thursday morning and today is saturday - anyway, sometime after the blog below about the kissing in the rain song, he and i were talking about che guevara and i said how much i wanted a red "che" tee shirt - and i thought i would order one while he's here - a few minutes later i went into my room and flipped on the tv to a story about "che" - now how often do we hear the media on "che" these days - well, i guess at least once for me - really fun time for me to have christopher here and wanted to share our little stories - by the way, he is the grandson who has always spoken [since he was a toddler] of dreaming that he "flies with the eagles" - such a beautiful spirit he is!

the power of words - of belief - and of KNOWING...

this is a story of several things - it is the story of my son stephen and his experience with the power of WORDS and of THOUGHTS...it is a story of spirit and of body, of INTENTION, of BELIEF, but FAR MORE than mere BELIEF - a story of KNOWING - and of SURVIVAL against all odds -

in 1999, stephen found himself at death's door after four separate physicians had failed over the course of a week to correctly diagnose his real medical problem and that was a pulmonary embolism - the bottom line was that on august 29, he found himself back in an emergency room of the first hospital he had gone to for help a week earlier - this time, within an hour, the correct diagnosis was made - but for stephen it was too late according to the doctors who advised me to call in our minister and to contact his siblings to come home - he was immediately placed on life support in icu - his sisters were called in from the east coast, his other sisters rushed to the hospital, friends came and some of them performed group prayers while he was still in the ER - his ex-wife out of state was called in - once in ICU his condition deteriorated moment by moment - medications were increased then decreased - medications were added and then removed - machine after machine was hooked up to this organ and then another organ - the second night he was taken to a small surgical room where a heart procedure was done and we [his family] were called into the room to say "goodbye" - i remember being led into this procedure room - my daughters were there and stephen's father and stepmother and sister were there - and there was my son lying on a stark operating table - naked except for a single sheet from his waist down - his skin was dark gray - almost a lavender gray - his body was swollen - the room felt frigid - i stood there in the middle of the floor - frozen, transfixed in time - time stood still - i remember standing there desperately trying to intellectually emotionally make sense of what i was seeing - the almost-corpse of my child - everyone was sobbing - and i remember the eyes of them all - they were all looking at me - trying to see what i was going to do and how i was going to do it - and i remember saying to myself, literally, SUCK IT UP - DO NOT GIVE IN TO THIS - YOU MUST NOT BELIEVE THIS - YOU MUST NOT SEE WHAT THEY SEE - HEAR WHAT THEY HEAR - FEEL WHAT THEY FEEL - SOB WHAT THEY ARE SOBBING - YOU MUST KNOW YOU DO KNOW that he will not die - and i remember the wetness of tears falling down my cheeks and the salty taste of them on my lips - and in this moment - this microsecond - my body physically straightened - i remember it as if it were yesterday - my body straightened and i looked up at all of them, wiped my tears and walked over to my son and told him that he was fine - that we were there with him waiting for him to awaken - and then i turned to the others in the room and whispered to them that they had to save their tears and their prayers for somewhere else - that when they were in stephen's presence - and mine - they could have no other thought except that he was going to awaken and he would be well - it was simple, really - clear as day to me - we had to not only believe, we had to KNOW - and so, thenceforth and forever more, whenever a doctor would come to me - and they did, several times daily, sometimes hourly, with more negative medical news, each of them was met with the same response - when one told me that 99% of his patients did not make it at the point where stephen was, i said HOW WONDERFUL!!! THAT MEANS HE HAS A ONE PERCENT CHANCE AND THAT'S ALL HE NEEDS - THAT'S GREAT NEWS! - when they came to me and told me they had nothing else to offer but more experimental procedures that had never even been tried on a human, i said OH, THAT'S GREAT NEWS, YOU'VE GOT PROCEDURES UNTRIED STILL - HOOK HIM UP! and when i would walk into his cubicle and find them clustered there around his bed, shaking their heads, and mummering negativities, i would call them out onto the floor and tell they that they were prohibited from using any of that language, saying any of those negative words, in the presence of my son - and, further, that i did not want them saying them ANYwhere - if his own physicians did not know he was to improve, how could he? - every day i took something else that he liked to him - one day i took his favorite pizza and sat it beside him to smell - and we stood around his bed talking about how good the pizza was - i took his favorite willie nelson music and played it in a boom box in his cubicle - he was on four life-support systems but that was just his body - i knew that the "real" stephen was there smelling the pizza and singin' with willie - and so, with my sometimes not so gentle prodding, the doctors began to change - the nurses were more cheerful around him - from that moment in the cardiac procedure room, not another tear left my eyes - i made my life as "usual" as possible - i went to and from work and the hospital - his sisters went back to the east coast - and then the time came for all life support to be removed - he had been left on longer already than was feasible - he had to be weaned from it all else face the issues if he weren't - and so there were weeks then of the ups and downs of that process - but through it all, we went on with as much of things as usual as was possible - and then, one day when i got there, his eyes were open - he was still on a ventilator and several other machines - but he was awake - and from there - another month and he came home - he had a long road of recovery and was left with some deficits - but today he is able to work and do most of the things he did before - for me, this was such a turning point in my individual life - in how i began to see things differently - to do things differently - to THINK things differently, to SAY things differently - i experienced first-hand the POWER OF THOUGHT - the POWER OF KNOWING over belief - the POWER OF WORDS - i no longer allow negativity around me in friends, television, movies, books, employment - i no longer keep negative words in my vocabulary - i seek out positivity - now, that is not to say that i am 100% successful in these things, 100 % of the time, but i am cognizant of them every single moment and that is all i can do - one moment at a time -

POSTSCRIPT: i want to clarify my comment regarding prayer above - while i do totally understand the m any different ways of accomplishing the same thing and do not wish to negate in any way anyone's individual chosen methodology - ie, prayer, belief, thought, whatever - for me, in the context of that moment, the manifestation of any of those things meant that there was the possibility of my son's death - and i refused to accept that - the saying of a prayer, for example, meant to me, in that moment, that a prayer NEEDED to be said - i simply chose not to NEED but to KNOW - there is a difference - do you know what i mean? i hope so! namaste' - j

the power of words...

...words have the power to both destroy and heal - buddha

...whatever words we utter should be chosen with care for people will hear them and be influenced by them for good or for ill - buddha

...you can change your world by changing your words - remember life and death are in the power of the tongue -
joel osteen

...words differently arranged have a different meaning...and meanings, differently arranged, have different effects - blaise pascal

...we are what our thoughts have made us - so take care about what you think - 
words are secondary - thoughts live - they travel far - swami vivekananda

it's all about knowing...

i am frequently asked
how i manage to "LOOK" so young -
my response is easy -
what do you mean?
i don't KNOW that i'm
NOT young...

...for some reason that came to my mind just now as i was cruising the www - and i came across this quote which resonates with my own philosophy -

Aerodynamically

the bumblebee

shouldn't be able to fly,

but the bumblebee

doesn't know that

so it goes on flying anyway--

Mary Kay Ash

it's all in the KNOWING...

from the mouths of babes........gumballs and more

a year or so ago, while at macy's with my daughter and her then five-year-old little girl, babygirl decided that she wanted bubblegum from the giant gumball machine in the children's clothing department - however, as is usually the case, neither her mother nor i thought we had any change at all - but finally we found one single quarter - ONE - and babygirl wanted a RED gumball and RED ONLY so she was going to need more than one quarter obviously as the huge machine was full of all different colors - thousands of gumballs and only ONE CHANCE at a RED one - well, you know, when you're five years old, having a RED GUMBALL is a really really big deal - it was for me at five, anyway, and so, too, it was for babygirl - so there we were - one quarter and thousands of gumballs away from a red one - my daughter continued to prepare babygirl for the inevitability of a green one or a blue or yellow or orange gumball, which only served to upset babygirl more - it was then time for YAYA INTERVENTION - so, i told babygirl that all she had to do was to focus on a red gumball if she really really wanted one - she had to look into the exit cup and see one single red gumball first in line to pop out when her quarter struck - i reminded her that yaya had never told her anything that wasn't true or possible - and asked her to believe to know that yaya was telling THE TRUTH now - and that she could have that red gumball if she just believed and, moreover, if she KNEW she was getting the red one - she had to KNOW not just believe - and there IS a difference - so she stood still for a moment, looked at the outlet cup and said "red gumball, come on out" as she inserted her one little quarter - and then, before she could catch it, there onto the floor bounced a RED GUMBALL - which she promptly grabbed, blew off, and popped into her little mouth -

[the image is not the exact machine, but similar - our gumball machine held about 5,000 one-inch gumballs and it was full!]

december 29, 2007 - pathway to truth along I-95

7:57 am - my friend, rich,

from new jersey,

had just sent me a note asking

if we could get together the following weekend:

"we can meet on the path to truth

or at a rest stop along I-95 in South Jersey" -

as i sat reading his note,

the TODAY morning show came on

with the news anchor announcing

a major accident on I-95 in Jersey -

november 3, 2007 - answering phone before it rings

the same day as the incident of the walmart parking lot experience posted below, while i was out running errands, another experience with the phone [which for me are very frequent] occurred - just driving down the highway and reached over and picked up the phone because i "felt" it ring - then realized it hadn't really rung but as i held it in my hand, it did ring - this is the kind of thing i experience so often i don't even keep track of them - it just happens that i jotted this one down in conjunction with my note to myself on the sinking of the explorer and the walmart parking lot incidents below -

november 3, 2007 - bomb threat experience

on saturdays i usually am out and about running errands, lunching with my daughters, shopping and all the usual things that one does on days off work - this particular saturday i decided to visit my daughter lisa who had just moved into her new home across town - another thing i was debating was whether or not to stop at the local wal-mart store since i had to pass it enroute to lisa's - on the drive over, i have this mental dialogue about stopping to shop on my way TO lisa's or afterward - but i finally drove up to WM parking lot and even as i did so, continued to have this mental dialogue about stopping or not stopping - i got into the parking lot and just drove around several isles, but did not park, finally deciding i just didn't want to stop then - so i went out the other end of their lot and on to lisa's where i stayed a couple of hours - then headed back toward walmart from her house but as i approached the turn-off to the store, i saw that a police blockade and law enforcement and emergency personnel were everywhere - the store had been evacuated and the parking lot cleared of cars - the store had received a serious bomb threat -

ghandi on thought...

A man is but

the product of

his thoughts -

what he thinks,

he becomes.

creating the creation...

I was a hidden treasure

and desired to be known:
therefore I CREATED

THE CREATION

in order

to be known.

-- Sufi creation myth

simone's synch-song?

just now i was sitting thinking contemplating watching the sunshine play on a few pillowly clouds as i played on my laptop and a string of words came to mind "come on daddy, feed my soul, i need some sugar in my bowl" which i had remembered from a song of nina simone's many moons ago - i've no idea why i was thinking about those lyrics - i mean [with the exception of two years ago when i put together some poetic words for someone, which i eventually posted to gypsywoman world may 15], i can't even remember the last time i listened to nina simone - maybe a year or more ago - and certainly had not mentioned or discussed her with anyone in at least that long - but while i'm sitting here humming those words aloud actually, my sister [with whom i've not spoken in almost two weeks] called from louisiana and after a minute or so, said, "oh, by the way, i wanted to tell you i just came across a website called 'simone's world' and it belongs to nina's daughter - you have to see it!" -

the maelstrom...

yesterday was one of those days - and the day before, actually - one of those days when it seemed that every thought i had every action i took every word i read everything i saw or heard was interconnected intertwined each with the other and with the thoughts words actions of others, especially others with whom i have been in recent contact and/or whom i have just "met" so to speak -

things like picking up a book i'd not read and opening it to the page with a name someone else had just mentioned but of whom i'd never heard - picking up the phone before it rang - walking into the room talking about a particular person and flipping on the television to find a news story being broadcast about that person - seeing the same triple numbers in multiple places as i was out and about, out of a ream of paper picking the exact number of sheets i needed [without counting], extracting from several bottles the exact number of pills necessary to fill a particular container, picking up a grocery item on a whim and my daughter later calling me to ask me to pick up that exact item, -

the list goes on and on - the content of each somewhat trivial/innocuous in nature, comparatively speaking, at least - and these kinds of things are not at all unusual to me - or even to most of us - on isolated occasions or irregular times, etc - but the past few days, for me, the frequency has been almost constant - at one point early on the other day, i thought i would start jotting them down but they continued with such frequency that i found i simply would have to record every single thing i had done or thought or said or had seen, etc - and so, i was unable to even begin a list -

and this, too, has happened in times past - this constancy of these kinds of things - one correlation i believe may be my recent "new journey" in the quest for more knowledge and "visiting for the first time, and re-visiting" this part of ME, thus, having ME more open and receptive and cognizant of possibilities -

happily, these incidents of the last few days have been rather light-natured in tone - i mean, nothing terribly negative or earth-shattering - no associated tragic incidents or devastating illnesses, etc - but it caused a flood of memories of all the other times in my life when the associations were not so "light" or "unblimished by tragedy" - times when i had to consciously diligently "work", to "focus", to "shut 'it' off", to "stop the flow" of the overwhelming incidents about which i felt such a responsibility - and it seems, too, that time of year somehow plays a role in the frequency of these things for me - it seems that spring and summer have been more often the periods of intensity that i remember, anyway - perhaps there is a connection with the geomagnetic activity of the periods -

the whole point of this rambling is that i have set up this blog to memorialize to share my own personal experiences of the "extraordinary" - experiences which we all have and with which i, anyway, continue to be fascinated - but in these few days, have been unable to put finger to keyboard to do so - in any event, i look forward to this journey, this deeper exploration, this quest/this thirst for more knowledge for more growth - bon voyage to us all -

buddha on THOUGHT

All that we are
is the result of
what we have thought.
If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought,
pain follows him.
If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought,
happiness follows him,
Like a shadow that never leaves him.