Voting

Your vote is your choice. Getting a vote is an important step in becoming responsible for the world around you, to making decisions about the physical world you choose to occupy. To let the world know what you believe. It’s important to share. We learn from each other and by making decisions as a group we can learn how to better our society.

Would you vote for a world where every decision you made was approved? Every law, mandate, mode of operating, what everything costs, where resources go, how energy is used, how your neighbors feel around you, and so much more. This is a world that the candidate you voted for wins. The law you approved gets approved. You pay the taxes you want to pay. You make the choices, and get to live alongside people who agree with you.

How to we create worlds where people make the majority of their own decisions on how to operate. Groups can find each other and live in their preferred manner, as long as it is in accordance with Earth’s laws. Earth’s laws can’t quite be voted on, they seem to be the system we exist in and we must respect Earth and her Natural Laws.

Your vote is your choice. What do you choose? How do you choose to live today, in a way you can share for future generations?

Safe Hugs,

The Happy President

Excerpts from “Being & Caring”, Part One Chapter Six

“BEING & CARING, A PSYCHOLOGY FOR LIVING” by Victor Daniels and Laurence J. Horowitz, 1976, 1984

Highlights from the book chosen by The Happy President.

CHAPTER SIX: THE STRUCTURE OF AWARENESS

My awareness if my life. It is the source of my survival. My lack of awareness is my limit, and could mean my end.

Developing our awareness means learning to live in contact with our own experience. We can easily be so caught up in what we’re doing that we don’t realize how we’re doing it. “The question at stake,” declared Epictetus, “is this: Are we in our senses, or are we not?”

WHAT AWARENESS IS – AND ISN’T

Awareness is the sensing of what exists, how it exists, and where and when it exists – its internal and external context. In contrast to knowledge, which is a file cabinet of information we learned in the past, awareness involves present sensing, along with thinking about how present events connect with other aspects of our lives. Just as our direct experience becomes more meaningful when we connect it with the rest of what we know, many educators now are realizing that we learn much more when our thinking occurs in a context of experiencing.

Zen teachers speak of developing a mirror mind that can reflect whatever image falls upon it clearly and without distortion or interpretation.

With awareness, often you don’t need to “figure out” why something is happening. Instead, as you become more aware of your actions and reactions, you begin to discover answers to some of your questions. The evens inside you may just need time to emerge.

What happens with awareness is unpredictable. That’s both the delight and the frustration of discovery.

Full awareness is possible only when seeing, hearing, or grasping the truth is more important than getting something else I want. Otherwise I distort my awareness in the service of my wants.

It’s important to note that self-awareness is totally different from “self-consciousness.” In self-consciousness, as the term is popularly used, a small bit of my attention goes to noticing what I’m doing or how I look. Mostly I’m worrying about what others are thinking about me. Mark Twain observed that others do very little of that kind of thinking, so relax. Just note that if you start to feel self-conscious, it’s a signal to pull your attention out of projective thinking and into active observing.

DEVELOPING OUR AWARENESS

Developing our awareness involves learning to observe the process rather than getting lost in directing it. Otherwise we end up repeating again and again the same old cycles of thought, emotion, or behavior. When we become aware, we can rely on the wisdom of our organism.

There’s essential value in learning to be aware of the obvious.

Awareness and Self-Acceptance

Awareness and self-acceptance are reciprocal. In my fullest awareness I am seeing, hearing, and feeling what is…including my judging of people, events, and things as “bad” or “wrong,” which usually colors or tints my awareness.

When I observe and I accept what I do, think and feel as the way I am now, including my judging behavior as “right” or “wrong,” I can perceive what I”m doing most clearly. Only when I’m aware of what I”m doing do I have the option of doing something else. The exciting paradox is that by accepting and acknowledging myself as completely all right just as I am now, at this instant in my life, new discoveries and directions become available.

Gestalt therapist Stella Resnick elaborates on this process: “When people first start out in therapy…frequently…they are afraid to see themselves because they think they won’t like what they see. They are judging themselves, and this judging is experienced with pain…Witnessing without judging…[reduces] internal conflict and self-victimizations…Growth comes not through goals of unrealistic perfection, but out of a place of inner support and self-love.”

The important even is your observation of what you’re doing, on the inside and the outside, whatever that is.

ATTENTION AND DISTRACTION

Attention is focused awareness. Bare attention is attention on here-and-now events. It involves two elements: an ability to concentrate – to focus my attention where I want it – and an attentiveness to what is happening in the moment.

Zen masters speak of one-pointed attention – focusing on just one thing at a time. For instance, when I watch a sunset, I’m just watching the sunset, not doing anything else. Our ordinary consciousness, however, is many pointed. As I watch the sunset, my attention darts back and forth between first this thought and then that one. Indeed, most of my attention may go into mental processes that keep me out of my here-and-now sunset.

Gestalt psychologists speak of the figure-ground phenomenon. I can drive down a street many times and never notice a certain mailbox. It’s just part of the background or “ground” against which other things stand out. But suppose I want to mail a letter. Now the mailbox leaps out at me. Suddenly it is the “figure,” and everything else become the “ground.”

Interest and Attention

What I’m aware of depends not only on what’s happening, but also on what I choose to pay attention to. Perls comments, “The pictures or sounds of the world do not enter us automatically, but selectively. We don’t see; we look for, search, scan for something. We don’t hear all the sounds of the world, we listen.”

I’m likely to become fragmented and out of touch with myself if I habitually respond to the stimuli that bid for my attention, instead of listening and searching. I stay more centered and more in touch with my aliveness when I actively choose what I attend to. My interest creates the meaning I find in a situation.

Distraction

I want to feel free to ask you to repeat what you said if I didn’t quite understand it. And I want you to ask me to rephrase if you didn’t hear what I said. If we agree on these two things, we’ll hear each other ore often.

Attention in Everyday Tasks

In his intriguing book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1976), Robert M. Pirsig describes how several principles of awareness and attention can be applied to exacting, demanding jobs.

First, assume an attitude of modesty. The higher your opinion of yourself, Pirsig says, the less likely you are to admit that you’ve goofed on something and the more likely you are to ignore facts that turn up.”

Pirsig’s second principle is for those whose anxiety stops them from getting started. Read ever book and magazine you can about how to do the repair job, he suggests. “Remember, too, that you’re after peace of mind – not just a fixed machine. And think the job through before you start to work: You can save time and trouble later by listing everything you’re going to do on little slips of paper and then reorganizing the sequence as you think about the job.

The third principle is: When you’re bored, stop. Boredom means your mind is wandering elsewhere. That’s when we make mistakes.

Pirsig’s fourth principle – Impatience is a great cause of mistakes. One cause of impatience is underestimating how long the job will take. Pirsig’s solution is to allow an indefinite time for the job and to double the allotted time when circumstances force time planning.

A fifth Pirsig principle is that “overall goals must be scaled down in importance and immediate goals must be scaled up.”

Finally, the sixth useful Pirsig principle is called “mechanic’s feel.” Mechanic’s feels involves attending carefully to the material I’m working with – its softness or hardness, its elasticity, and what it tells me about how it wants to be handled.

Boredom

Boredom is a de-energizing of my attention. It can function as a useful statement about what I’m doing. It can identify something I don’t want to hear. In any event, it can be a way I torture myself and deaden my life.

I most often feel bored when I try to pay attention to something that doesn’t interest me right then. My options may include finding something interesting in it, changing what’s happening, drifting off into my own world of thoughts and fantasies, or leaving. I don’t have to poison myself by staying bored.

That “poison” can be real and deadly. For instance, you’ve probably known old people who died not long after retiring, or who died shortly after their spouses. Others in similar situations find interests that nourish and sustain them.

When you and I are talking, if I’m not interested in what’s happening, I can change it. I do you no favor by pretending that I”m interested in what you’re saying when I”m not. That poisons us both. When I”m listening because I think I “should,” I feel dead or resentful, and you and I make little contact.

As I develop my ability to be interested in wherever I am and whomever I’m with, I’m less at the mercy of circumstances and I have less need to be “entertained.”

EMPTINESS

Our capacity to be aware is hindered if our minds are too full.

Our culture encourages us to be too busy – to fill our consciousness with as many things and activities as we can. Space that isn’t filled with things and time that isn’t filled with action can seem threatening.

Sometimes people in counseling report sensing a sort of frightening black hole or deep pit inside them. So they grab for whatever they can, hanging on desperately so they won’t “fall in.”

Fritz Perls encouraged people who experience such feelings to let go – to go ahead and plunge into the darkness, being attentive to what they observe and feel. Again and again people find that when they get past their panic, they attain a valuable experience of their interior worlds. Perls spoke of the emptiness that we sometimes so fear as a fertile void that hold important keys to change.

There may be times when you feel the kind of frustrated emptiness in which nothing seems to have much meaning, and you get an uneasy feeling of something wrong because you lack defined activity or direction. At such times we need to remember that a pause in a person’s life is seldom an accident. It can be a time of many possibilities. When you nothing to do is a good time to do your nothing.

Excerpts from “Being & Caring”, Part One Chapter Four

“BEING & CARING, A PSYCHOLOGY FOR LIVING” by Victor Daniels and Laurence J. Horowitz, 1976, 1984

Highlights from the book chosen by The Happy President.

CHAPTER FOUR: INTEGRATION AND FRAGMENTATION: PULLING OURSELVES TOGETHER

The old German word Gestalt, passed on to us by the Gestalt psychologists early in this century, means “form, pattern, whole, configuration.” It has to do with how the parts of something fit together as a consistent whole – or fail to do so.

Similarly, if I’ve found ways for the elements of my personality to live together comfortably, in a relatively “integrated” fashion. I can know the different parts of me and have them available when I need them. Otherwise I’m somewhat “disintegrated,” like to keep parts of myself out of my awareness and to work hard to avoid perceiving how my different sides conflict.

BECOMING A WHOLE PERSON

There are two ways to view being whole. In one, we are all by definition whole: Somewhere in this mind-body-spirit being that I call “me,” everything that’s part of me exists, available to me when I find a way to get to it.

To the degree that I’m in contact with all of myself, I am whole in the second sense of the word: I have the many sides of me available when I need them.

In both our older and newer parts, there are places where we don’t let our life energy flow: thoughts we stop ourselves from thinking, emotions we stop ourselves from feeling, and actions we stop ourselves from taking. Perls spoke of those places as “holes in the personality,” aspects of ourselves that we don’t allow ourselves to recognize or experience. Each contains a dimension of myself that’s lost to me as long as I keep that part of me “off limits”.

My personal power and inner richness becomes available as I reopen and “reown” the disowned parts of myself. An important element of this is having and using alternatives – diverse ways to deal with myself, people, and events. Such alternatives emerge, in part, from recognizing my most habitual way of responding. That awareness opens other possibilities.

Freud drew attention to a process that functions like an “internal executive” to determine which parts of us can express themselves when, and how. It “tests reality” – checking out what’s real and what isn’t, so we don’t make unnecessary mistakes.

This is ego function, not to be confused with the pop usage of the word in which we say someone “has a big ego” or “is egotistical,” meaning the person thinks himself or herself more important or “better” than other people.

Freud used ego as one of the principal actors in his psychic drama. There is id, or the processes of responding to hunger, thirst, aggression, and sexuality; ego, which serves as the mediator between id forces and the restraints and constraints of outside reality; and superego, a conscience that “includes…the rules and precepts handed down by parents and authorities and the ‘ego ideal’ fashioned by the individual, i.e. the kind of person he or she aspires to become…Like ego, the superego is but partly conscious.”

Now lets’ return to the other meaning of ego, where as Alfred Adler declared, “Man is but a drop of water…but a very conceited drop”. There are different elements of this kid of ego: Infantile ego is my process of saying “Am I getting enough?” A “no” response leads me to demand, “Me! Me! Me!” Image-based ego is my process of asking, “Am I good enough?” It isn’t present in early life but develops as the social self grows out of our perception of other people’s evaluations of us. One side of image-based ego is self-glorification. This is telling myself and others, and wanting others to tell me, how marvelous I am.

The other side of image-based ego is self-depreciation: telling myself how worthless I am and imagining that others see me that way too. Self-glorification and self-depreciation both grow out of my anxieties about my value, lovableness, or competence.

Feeling separate and isolated is an important part of infantile and image-based ego. I see how you and I are different, and how you may want to hurt me, but I have a hard time seeing how we are the same and how you care.

As I learn to take better care of my emotional needs and to value myself as I am, I feel less need to put others down, “win,” or seem “important” – and I more easily give what others need and get what I want.

THE SHADOW

According to mythology and superstition, a person without a shadow is the Devil himself – or herself. Even today, most people are cautious with someone who seems “too good to be true”. Knowing who we are involves facing our shadowy sides as well as our sunny ones.

Jung used the term shadow for our unacceptable and unacknowledged sides. Like Freud’s ego, shadow is not a “thing” but a process, a useful metaphor. It refers to the parts of us that we hide from our conscious mind – including desirable qualities that we’ve learned to think of as “not part of us” – and the way we hide them. As a guideline, the narrower the standards and definitions that govern our life, the more powerful our shadow side.

While shadow tendencies remain hidden, suggests Fordham (1966), they grow in strength and vigor, and when they burst through they may overwhelm the rest of the personality. One Half of you must understand the Other Half or you will tear yourself apart.”

Refusal to face myself can keep me stuck in repetitive, self-defeating patterns, since unconsciously I disavow other possibilities. Integration of feelings and form becomes the first order of business.

OUR INTERIOR DRAMA

The philosopher Martin Buber declared that wholeness depends on the quality of an individual’s dialogue with himself or herself (1971). We are each multiple, complex, and interdependent, like a collection of different people, or “characters,” living together in one body. When I have two of my characters fighting for control, I can both sabotage and torture myself.

DEVELOPING OUR UNDERDEVELOPED SIDES

Creativity exists when we find new ways of understanding relationships and relating to the world of things. It can occur at the easel, at the kitchen table, or at an insurance executive’s desk. Creativity includes perceiving and responding to the world anew, out of the “sense of wonder” – the ability to enter a situation and see it “as if for the first time.”

Jung’s Psychological Types

Thinking, Feeling, Sensing, and Intuiting.

Anima and Animus

Jung gave the names anima and animus to two groups of qualities that exist in the unconscious – anima in men and animus in women. The Adam and Eve story, he suggested, points to such a splitting-apart, and then to the continuing effort to find one’s other half and achieve again the primal unity we knew in the beginning.

Jung used the term anima for the presence in the male personality of a group of qualities often considered “feminine”: receptive, nurturing, soft, intuitive, drawing on the depths of the inner world and the unconscious.

Jung called another constellation of traits, those that often are part of a woman’s unconscious side, the animus: assertive, achieving, rational, problem solving, outgoing.

In a balanced personality, “masculine” and “feminine” elements intertwine. There aren’t really “two sides” at all, but a multiplicity of qualities that occur naturally in both men and women. I’m a many-sided being – and I need all of me.

Berne’s “Parent, Adult, and Child”

Psychiatrist Eric Berne (1961) described another polarity in each of us, which he calls our parent ego state and child ego state. As children, we were influenced to varying degrees by one or more adults.

When we reaming in touch with spontaneity, we can still be playful and childlike, even as adults. This is our natural child.

As my little professor, I figure out how things work and how to get what I want. I’m curious about and interested in everything.

My adapted child as learned ways to avoid punishment and get rewards. I may along with the demands on me or run away from them: I turn into a “withdrawn child” who is distant and unresponsive; a “rebellious child” who says “no” to almost everything; or a “compliant child” – a “good boy” or “good girl” who does everything I’m told to.

With our “inner parent” as with our “inner child.” we make choices about how we do and don’t want to act. If my parent nurtured and cared for me with great love and concern, my “parental” care-taking is likely to have some of those same qualities. We might call this my nurturing parent. If my parent gave many orders, punished me often, and was cold and distant, then I may express some of those qualities. We can call this my judgmental parent. Or if my parent smothered me with so much affection and protectiveness that I had a hard time learning to stand on my own feet, I may try to do too much for you and not encourage your self-determination. This is my overprotective parent.

Whatever my past, in my present I can move toward being less judgmental, less overprotective, and more nurturing in taking care of myself as well as my children. My rational adult is the part of me that has learned to deal with myself and my world as effectively as I can based on the information I have available. My emotional adult is the part of me that has learned to appreciate and live with my feelings.

THE MEDICINE WHEEL

“Each person is a unique Living Medicine Wheel, powerful beyond imagination, that has been placed up one this earth to Touch, Experience, and Learn. To the North on the Medicine Wheel is found Widsom…The South is the place of Innocence and Trust, and for perceiving closely our nature of heart…The West is the Looks-Within place, which speaks of the introsepctve nature of man…The East…is the place of Illumination, where we can see things clearly far and wide…” – Hyemeyohsts Storm in Seven Arrows.

Money and Value

What is money? Where does it come from? How do we use it? How does it make us feel?

The current climate of the world is that of massive job layoffs, businesses closing to keep people healthy, and humans scared of getting a paycheck to afford to live each month. When we’ve operated on this “you have to work for money” idea, and when there is no work to be done, what do we do? Of course there are things that can happen that improve humans lives but don’t “earn” money. But the money system, as it stands, is broken. We won’t be having as many jobs in the future (yay!) because we have a new system that makes life easy for everyone.

We’ve got to adapt the system. We have to look at finance and see what things really cost, and at what cost they are to Earth and humanity. We have to stop pollutive industries and we need to use technology to improve quality of life for each and every one of us. We are operating on a hundred year old system and it needs to change.

Money came about as a neutral way to exchange goods and services. It makes sense. I have cows that make milk, you have wheat that can be made into bread. How do we figure out what is a fair trade? Well, whatever the two parties agree upon. But milk goes bad after some time, and wheat can get moldy. What if I want to give some of my milk now but don’t want any wheat? Now we create a neutral, non-perishable form of transfer in the form of metal coins, or shells, or any neutral item. Money was created because it doesn’t “go bad” like milk. It can be taken and used for anything. I like it. It makes sense.

Traders would bring goods to market and then sell them to buyers who liked getting things they could not provide for themselves. When you have foreign travelers, you will have some foreign forms of currency. Some people use gold coins, some people use silver coins, some people use shells from their local beach. With these different forms of currency, we now need to create an exchange rate and thus have someone that sits at a table – in Italian table is banco, where the word for bank comes from – and makes sure you can exchange one form of currency for another at the same value. These table bankers now became middle men – only dealing with money and not the exchange of goods.

When you accumulate a bunch of gold coins, what do you do with them? Well, you could store them in your house but you don’t have much security and people could come and steal it pretty easily. So now we have fortified buildings that will hold our gold for us, keep it safe, and let us access it whenever we want. We also realized that for larger transactions it is a lot easier to have a piece of paper with a value on it rather than dragging a roomful of gold across town. So we have representative money – paper money that says it is worth something backed up by the bank holding your gold. It says that whomever has this note has the right to access so much gold in that particular bank. Cool.

What do banks do with all that gold sitting around? They figured out that you don’t come back to take much out very often, so would you notice if it weren’t all there? Well, they take the gold that you put in and loan it to someone else who wants to do something but can’t afford it on their own. The bank loans your money to other people. You don’t get a say to who is getting your money now that it is in the bank’s hands. The bank makes money off of interest from the loans. But why? What service are they really providing except for using someone else’s money without them knowing hoping that they don’t come to claim their gold at once?

Cows. That’s where the concept of interest comes from. Let’s say I have a heard of cattle but want to get on a boat and search for exotic spices. You have a boat but are sick of sailing and wouldn’t mind looking after the cows for the year or so it takes you to come back. What happens to a heard of cows after a year? They procreate, making little cow babies. So your one hundred cows are now hundred and seven cows. You can still keep the hundred cows you originally left, but it’s easy to let the seven new cows go to the guy that watched them for you. Makes sense.

Banks charging interest on money loans make no sense. Cows growing makes sense. Money to make money is immoral. Money to create value and add wealth is moral.

How these big corporations are making money off of humanity is by selling information that we don’t even realize they have on us. Anyone with a new car, one with cameras and GPS and all the fun stuff – those car companies track you and sell your information to the highest bidder. It knows where you go, what you listen to, and has videos of the area you live. Alexa hears everything you say. Siri listens to you. Targeted ads are everywhere, but I see a world where we don’t need more cheap products, we need more life-improving products that empower the individual.

What is the shift? It will be easy, actually. We look at corporate finance and take all the weeds out. We look at efficient energy systems using the modern technology that these corporations have access to and we shift from a weaponry making system to a livingry making system. It’s nice to see business with factory infrastructures switching production from cars or clothes to ventilators and scrubs for the health and safety of humanity. We can change.

The Earth wants to be played on. She wants humans to be happy, outside, laughing and jumping and playing on her with your friends, family, loved ones. She doesn’t want you stuck in a cubicle staring at emails all day. She doesn’t need you to make another million dollars on Wall Street, she needs you to laugh on the beach and jump in the ocean.

We do not need a bigger economy. We do not need more jobs. We have the technology, the knowhow, and the strength to create new systems where jobs are optional, you pursue what you want, and there is a basic level of care for each and every human on the planet. Earth does not charge rent for its inhabitants.

Transparent Finances for All. Removal of Corporate Personhood and the freeing up of all the money they weaseled out of paying.

What are taxes, and where do they go? Why do corporations not have to pay what they owe yet individuals do?

We also have to blend local and global economies. I’m for a one Earth currency, so no one is making money betting on exchange rates. Food becomes more local – grown in the Earth in your own backyard or a nearby public plot. Let’s disperse our population and get connected to the Land again. There are inexpensive high quality housing options that have been available and we are not using them. With technology it will be easy for us to have the luxuries we are used to but with an energy efficient, Earth-friendly way.

Money is formed out of a transaction. It’s when two or more parties need to agree on an exchange – putting a value on what something is worth. Money is not actually value. Or even real energy. It is a representation of energy and that is it. It is what we agree it to be. It came about naturally but then got manipulated by banks.

Profit seems to be a nasty word to me. Value, wealth, abundance are nice words. We can still use money as a form of exchange, but the cost of everyday items will be reduced considerably. It will be easier to live and breathe and play. We might need to build more theme parks.

Health and Happiness

The world is currently shutting down its usual activities due to the fear of COVID-19, commonly called the coronavirus. Two of my activities have been cancelled for the next two weeks because anyone with a cough or sniffle could give anyone else a deadly disease. Theme Parks, some of the most internationally visited places in the world, are shutting down for obvious reasons. The grocery store was busier than usual today, though. Toilet paper was sold out, pasta was almost all gone. People are really less concerned about carbs and more concerned with wiping their butt.

While I want everyone to be healthy, I would like to think that COVID-19 is just a way for Earth’s inhabitants to have time to stay at home and chill for awhile. Stop the hustle and grind to get a paycheck and instead slow down and check into the moment. Catch up on that latest streaming show. Call people you haven’t talked to in awhile. Learn a new skill even if you may never show it off in person. Live as if the the world is changing. Laugh with me, just not on me.

Spend time at home cleaning through your old shit. Read up on the KonMari Method. Keep only what sparks joy in you. Eat consciously. Plant a garden and see what grows by the time this whole thing ends. How you take care of your home speaks volumes about you. Keep yourself clean and stop using so much toilet paper.

Don’t let this silly virus that originally came from a chicken make us become zombies to one another. Stay healthy, wash your hands, and trust in the power of the human body. It has been scientifically proven to be able to heal itself.

Stay Happy and Healthy,

The Happy President

LibertyHand

Wash Your Hands, Please.