behind the beautiful forevers

Generally I won't bother reading a book by a Pulitzer Prize winner. I've read too many that are boring and tedious. But the topic held my interest, it was at Costco for $9.99, so I gave it a shot. And discovered that Katherine Boo is an exception to my loose rule about prize winning authors. Seldom does a book grab me and hold onto my head as this one did. I told everyone I saw the day I’d almost finished it—even the bank teller—that they had to read it. Consciousness raising, yes. Soul impacting, possibly. And all without bias, or tugging at heart strings, just the facts, allowing the reader to make up his or her mind about how their choices and actions, in an effort to maintain a sense of worth, to feel any level of peacefulness, might be what keeps bullying and thuggery the status quo. No matter what economic condition or country examined. This book spoke to me in a way that clarified how the urge for self-preservation can, and often does, overshadow morality. How each of us will ignore those oppressed until they rise up against that oppression to cause damage to our own world—be it large or small. Thugs exist as long as their thuggery gets a payoff. Perhaps some people are genuinely compassionate, while others only make real changes when their way of life is actually threatened. And as soon as the threat is stopped they go right back to ignoring the underlying cause of the threat. Even politicians and corporate magnates can be looked at from the point of them being fearful that their world could collapse should they do much of anything to change the state of their world. Enough is never enough when that old Malthusian principle comes into the dynamics of thought—whether conscious, unconscious, or sub-conscious—that there isn’t enough to go around. Democracy becomes: let the mongrels sleep in their own feces, and fight among each other, unless they become a thinking pack.

A NEW WAY TO VIEW YOUR DREAMS

The last experience with Kindle was a great success, so I am delighted to let you know that in partnership with Kindle, my book that includes over 6,000 dream symbols, The Sandman’s Treasury, can be downloaded at NO charge beginning March 7, 2014 through, March 11, 2014.

5 days - FREE Download

Here’s the link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/product/1461088941

We can use our dreams however we choose: ignore them, let them tell our fortune, or learn how to use them to change our future.

Please DO share this with your friends, family, associates…everyone. Thanks for your support. www.maysinclairphd.com

I CHOOSE MY PARENTS?

Where did the idea that we pick out our parents come from?

It comes from Buddhism. The belief that we each select our parents in each of our lives is well documented in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. That book explains what happens to a soul traversing from one incarnation to the next. The soul goes into what is called the Bardo, loosely translated as “The In Between” where the soul travels for seven weeks—forty-nine days—while Buddhist monks chant in an effort to guide the soul on its journey. The chants attempt to encourage the soul to accept one of the several heavens offered to it at various stages along the way. But if that does not happen, or cannot happen due to the need to balance out the positive and negative forces of karma left over from the actions and consequences in prior lives, the soul at the end of the Bardo is given the choice to accept any one of several couples for parents in its next life time. The soul sees all of those potential parents making love and the sexual magnetic energy is overwhelmingly strong. Still, the soul is encouraged, per the book and chanting monks, to be cautious not to go into what is called a ‘bad womb’.

What is meant by a bad womb is being reborn into a life where dharma or the ultimate reality will not be taught. The soul is told to aim its will towards requesting the couple to teach dharma and thus block any womb of those who will not, or to form the powerful intention to receive spiritual attainments from the couple that will block the womb of any who cannot. It is important to block the womb where there is lust, hate, and delusion.

The soul does not enter into an already made body, but it forms the body suitable for the soul to inhabit. The soul comes first. It constructs the body. It is the thought force of desire for sensory expression that causes the natural formation of the fetus to be molded by energy supplied by the creative impulse of the being that lived before. The best known Buddhist text, Dhammapada, opens up with: “everything we are is the result of what we have thought”. Therefore each of us can determine our past life experiences by looking at our bodies and can know what the future will bring by noting what our minds are thinking right now.

REINCARNATION...DO YOU BELIEVE IN IT?

Do you believe you’ve had a prior life? If yes, who were you, when did you live, and where was it? If no, how do you explain being trusting or wary about specific people you meet. And that sense of de je vous?

WHO TO HARP WITH…AT

For the last year or so my husband and I have been receiving numerous letters from various sources about the Homeowners Relief Program (HARP). My curiosity was aroused so I called our mortgage lender to find out what those offers were all about. I was promptly told they would refinance our loan to reduce our interest rate. During a half hour conversation I was delighted to hear all the wonderful things my lender would do so I would get to pay them less money.

That’s not what actually happened.

After paying a non-refundable fee of $350.00, spending a lot of my time over the next several weeks filling out a mountain of paperwork, standing by my FAX machine for several hours feeding in my last two years tax filings, and suffering through two separate appraisals because the first one took flight into the void, and seeing the unaccountably unattractive pictures of my home taken by the second appraiser that made the hair on my head stand on end, our lender did not make good on what was initially told to me. There was a lot of talk about Fannie May and Freddie Mack, but our lender wasn’t really offering a HARP loan. No, they ultimately wanted my husband and me to fork over thousands of dollars towards our loan with them so the mortgage would be 80% of the current market value.

Maybe it was my anger at the waste of my time, energy, and the non-refundable fee that caused me to rummage through the letters that were still being mailed to us. I dialed the telephone number on the top letter to find out if we could get our interest rate reduced…really.

As it happened, we could, and did.

The person (www.MyHomeLoansStore.com) I called made it all happen with less fuss and time than I’d spent with our original lender. He used the formulas listed and used by the government that showed the value of our home several thousands of dollars over that horrid appraisal we’d gotten. Admittedly I was surprised at how the value of our home had plummeted, but that is the point of HARP. The homeowners who have always paid their mortgage payments on time and have good credit are able to get some relief from the conditions of the home market—not just those who didn’t pay on time.

The acronym: HARP. Where does the “A” come from? Shouldn’t it be HORP? Maybe, but there are some lenders that I’d like to harp about and others who might be playing some soothing music to a homeowner’s ears.

SPIRITUAL LAWS…I’M SOOOO CONFUSED

If you have read any of the books about the Spiritual Laws, such as The Secret, you might sometimes get into spiraling mind games with yourself by having the following thoughts:

My thoughts create my life. I’m responsible for my thoughts. If I am unhappy about my life, it’s because of my own thoughts; therefore, it’s entirely my own fault.

No. That premise is wrong since it is incomplete. It assumes we live in a vacuum, ignoring the fact that our lives are filled with other people who also have thoughts and take actions. We are responsible for how we react to them, which means we need to process our thoughts about life in a way that is not reactionary. We must learn to be mature. Sometimes that means disengaging from those who cannot or will not look at their own thoughts and actions other than in a completely selfish way.

Here’s another:

I want my plans to turn out in the way I planned them. They don’t. I’m a control freak, and I shouldn’t have been trying to get things to go the way I wanted them in the first place.

Again, no. When plans are affected by other people, then that fact must be taken into consideration, too. Face it: some people dissemble and others lie. And one person’s truth is not always another’s truth. One of life’s most important lessons is to know who and when to trust and to not be naïve.

Remember: The Law of Detachment does not interfere with the Laws of Intention and Desire. The intention of going forward in some desired direction and having goals is not wrong. A person being prepared will be able to use the opportunities that appear, thus no solutions are forced. A person’s attention grows stronger, and it’s her or his intention that will organize its fulfillment. The Spiritual Laws work in ways that remove the tension and stress.

EVER LASTING LOVE

I, too, love to read books about vampires who are gorgeous and good. “Come on,” I ask, “who could ignore the charms of a passionate and sexy love story that ends with life…love eternal?” But then, I end up thinking about the latest, and then all of those countless fantasies I’ve read, and inevitably start teasing at the story line to pick out the parts that are immature. I question why a one hundred year plus vampire would be interested in an eighteen year old girl. I’m no where near one hundred years old and the thought of spending all of my time with an eighteen year old boy—no matter how gorgeous—would be tedious at best. And really, isn’t there something that smacks of pedophilia,as much as predatory, in the thought of being with a person who hasn’t had much experience of life? By the time I work through that creepy thought, I ask myself if love “should” last forever. I conclude: Love, by all means. But as a married—glued together—couple forever? Well, now that seems like pure emotional stagnation. Still, I’ll continue to sink my teeth into and gobble down those vampire “candy” books. They are just too tasty for me not to enjoy them.