Chapter 14
What is Life Like When It’s All About Conscious?

The Greatest Gift One Can Give Another

Funny how it looks like I am turning out to be a writer. I intentionally never took a typing class because I wanted my life to be all about things that I would create and do and in my 15-year old mind typing was only for people who wanted to be a secretary or go into an office management career. I remember that at the time my 15-year old mind could not comprehend a more structured, matter-of-fact and above all utterly boring fate.  I always figured with the space age which was so prevalently talked about and endlessly featured in movies, books and forecasts of the future at the time of my youth, the future would have computers that take dictation and so I figured that learning to type would be a waste of time for my personal future which would certainly render typing a cave man skill of the past. Turns out I was dead wrong. I now see that I was guiding my life based on my mind’s eye which was developed from little more than imagination and naivete. It had no touch with actual reality or any discernible sense of what the future would realistically hold. So, now that I find myself in a computer age with computers, blackberries, ipods and the like having become such a huge part of almost everyone’s life today, I have been left without the one skill that would be so beneficial to me and which I had previously thought would be a completely useless waste of time. Since typing with one finger and no translator would find me writing this book for the next fifty years or so, my wife is doing the typing, and the grammar correction and the spelling and the conversions to coherency.  She's better than the best computer of the space age of my youthful dreams though, so...

As it turns out, a life of working creatively with my hands, my skills and my visual sensibilities has ultimately amounted in my mind to nothing. All that stuff ever did was get me hunkered down so heavily entrenched in a life I was not suited for that I could not move. I am reminded of King Solomon when he asked the Lord for wisdom and was granted all that he asked.  He had all a man could possibly want and he reached the same conclusion as myself. I have broken through a barrier with my artistic understanding in that I realize that just making something to place on a wall or to create a work to be experienced is shortsighted and borders on meaningless. As a result, all my artistic endeavors have since been done without meaningful tangible results externally thus allowing my world to develop around me without my attention directed to it. All my artistic mind power has been directed inward for all these years after marriage to my wife for reasons that I continue to sort out. I have made progress, however, that I find worthy of sharing with you. Some of the issues are complex and difficult to understand. Sometimes fully knowing oneself can take a lifetime to comprehend. One of the most difficult parts in my life has been attempting to differentiate between the roles and perspectives that each of us had individually in viewing life and trying to achieve a harmonic unison. For example, what boundaries does one create to allow for fairness and order and structure in a marriage to for each partner to maintain their identity and significance. Those things are largely speculation and largely determined by the other person. In the early years of my marriage I saw the effects I am speaking of and instinctively reacted by blaming my wife. What I now see is that perhaps I had so much to say that consciously it could not be tolerated by her and was forced back inside myself to develop further internally. This was a difficult process that was ongoing during the entire length of our marriage. Sharing my thoughts and artistic analysis with my wife did not render the positive results and growth that a marriage is supposed to attain. Rather my wife did not comprehend my thoughts and ideas and we were not able to grow or merge our separate sets of thoughts and ideas into one. In the movie, “Groundhog Day,” Bill Murray relives the exact same day over and over again and each time learns lessons that he applies to the next day until he gets everything right and creates the perfect day. So each time I would confront my wife with my thoughts and ideas I would feel as if not all were accepted then none were accepted. I’m not good at tweeking and have always prefered to re-do from scratch and that is what I have done for all of these years. I have performed artistic analysis over and over through all these years and each time offer the totality of my new conclusions to my wife. She would then dismiss them through lack of understanding or any combination of other factors that I did not understand which would send me back to the drawing board. This happened over and over again throughout our marriage and it became the key to unlocking the analytic powers that eventually awoke our combined conscious. I do not mind the process now that I understand it better as long as before my life is over it all comes out for an exponentially more practical purpose. So upon the attainment of my higher conscious levels, a realization of what I?really need to do to develop my artistic body of work more fully developed for me. Ironically, I am finding that the the tools most suited to bringing out the fullness of what our combined conscious could be in a beneficial way to share with others will be in thoughts and words and require writing and all the skills I chose to dismiss as important in my youth.

I now find not my artistic abilities nor my means of communication to be limited in any way. I have up until this point only used my artistic abilities in a practical way in order to earn a living. As the blindsiding effect from the onslaught of distractions prevalent in our modern and confusing world took shape around me, my real true art suffered. I realize now that it became more and more internalized out of necessity. Now my biggest hindrance has become expressing all I need to as an artist and lies in the challenge of finding the ability to overcome the obstacles that have surrounded me and bogged me down. I find myself having to overcome obstacles that have nothing to do with art in order to tangibly create my art and share it with the world. The art is created and formed in me but internalized and useless until it comes out and can be shared with others.

My daily struggles now take place with my wife and my family and together we realize that the obstacles needing to be overcome have to do with our place in the world. Financial strains, responsibilities regarding children and the governing of all other aspects of our lives have overwhelmed us. We often wish that we could just have a personal financier like many of the masters in the days of yesteryear had. Of course, we know that Michaelangelo was not happy painting the Sistine Chapel at the bidding of his financier, the emperor, but he had obligations that he had to fulfill in order to maintain his financial backing. So the best that Michaelangelo could do was to express his artistic visions through work he was paid to do. Surely Michaelangelo would have not followed the same path in what he chose to create had he been independently able to finance his career and livelihood on his own. So there is a trade-off, and ultimately, we believe that the factors that can be most debilitating to the success of an artist are not factors regarding their own ability to create but their ability to control the other outside factors in their lives to develop a balanced and nurturing atmosphere that allows for the transition from one to another of worthy ideas.

We find ourselves stumbling and caught up by finances and wasted energies required to manage the physical things we own and have to maintain. These things snuck up on us primarily through the process of my art taking a backseat in our life as I’ve described previously. Our focus was blurred for a time as life’s challenges and obstacles redirected us to a life that has become far too normal. Normal, though not a bad word for most, for an artist and one with a highly developed conscious can be debilitating. Television, common societal suggestion, advice from parents and those that have come before, peers and all matter of other media suggesting promises of freedom offered from structure and normality. Without careful safeguards placed in one’s life over the onslaught inflicted on an individual from all manner of things in the world, the scales seem hopelessly stacked against the still, quiet conscious. Thank goodness the conscious never dies but only dims. It can always be revitalized and acted upon.

Inevitably, we now see that all the dreams we ran away from when we were younger still haunt us to this day.  How could we have done things differently for a better outcome? Until recently, we would not have been able to answer these questions even for ourselves. We are only in the process of beginning but since our feeling is that so few ever do begin that struggle, our sharing can be valuable to others.

Do you ever notice how it seemed in the olden days you could go to the elders for wisdom and guidance?
More so today than ever, those that have endured a long life seem to have fundamentally as little to offer as those just beginning to live their lives.  A long life seems to no longer mean a person has developed “wisdom” – which cannot be achieved without a developed conscious. We may have lost our way but because our roots were formed in creativity and conscious analytic growth, we know that we will not have to suffer this fate ultimately. We can still have much to offer those that would seek. The question is how well does what we have to offer manifest itself? We believe that we must first develop our conscious and ways to share our conscious with others so that as a collective group of conscious individuals all people can work in totality to guide and nurture the path of mankind in the same effective manner that one lone individual can do for himself. We believe that this is inherent in the design shown us by the Creator. Our natural efforts applied toward this endeavor, which we feel is rooted in the divine sacred plan of mankind by the Creator, is our ultimate purpose in life.

As a life choice, we have decided to put much more emphasis on the contributions that our conscious is prepared to offer in our lives from this point forth. It is only about conscious now for us and not much more since we’ve come to this realization. We are like the wine when you add it to a stove-top recipe you are preparing. We are full of flavor and substance but all the alcohol and unnecessary components have to evaporate and burn off. This process is finishing and we are looking forward to the flavor and the fullness of the end result of eliminating non-essential elements in our life that distract, waste time and take us down paths that are less productive than we would have liked. Worthless misdirection and things lacking substance have to leave us in order for us to be all that we wish to be. We are forever traveling towards a more developed physical manifestation of consciously aware people. We believe these types of traits in individuals are rare thus gathering perspective and insights from others is difficult. We have had a difficult time conclusively finding others who are placing these values at the core of their personal development. The reason we say this is not to say that others who strive for what we strive for do not exist, but the tools to identify them are so refined and exact that only under such close scrutiny as might be involved in a marriage or close friendship might yield enough insights to be able to ascertain a conclusive determination of a fully developed conscious in another. One thing we can say is that recognizing those with no regard to the conscious is as easy as walking out your front door or turning on your television. It is far easier to identify someone who operates with little or no regard of conscious thought. There are patterns that reveal themselves through the masses that show the uniform lack of conscious development.

On the other hand, there as of yet seem to be no similar patterns for developing the ability to identify a developed conscious in others. Growth takes a unique route with each person.  The telltale signs that they leave in their wake are as unique as a fingerprint. Such is the nature of what a conscious will do for a person. Until now we have never been able to locate anyone that could help us because of the unique quality that develops in each individual exploring each conscious. We realize that comparisons cannot be made productively and that each conscious must develop on its own. We cannot stress enough, ironically even though you are reading this right now, that you cannot look outside of yourself for development.  So what we are attempting to do is not guide but only offer you the suggestions for you to develop your own guidance.

Let’s talk about how so many accept and voluntarily live much lower quality and unfulfilled lives than they could. Whether you believe in a Creator or that everything is just happening becomes increasingly irrelevant when you delve into a study and understanding of the complexities regarding human potential, specifically the mind. Upon meditating and fathoming what a person is capable of, it becomes obvious how a person never seems to reach their full potential. There is always room for growth and surprises regarding the power of the human brain and conscious seem to surface on a regular basis, especially today in our world filled with information and the ability to look to and study so easily whatever one would wish. Ask yourself why would anyone , supreme being or human, bother to create anything worthless or that they knew ahead of time would not be all that it could be. It just wouldn’t make sense to have anything so limited. We would like to suggest that a belief that the development of all the conscious and the individual is meant to be would be desired by the Creator and that all development and enlightenment and growth that an individual can obtain is desired by the Creator as well. If you do not believe in a Creator, you will just have to allow yourself to believe that you can be more because you think you can. Therefore, to reach out to everyone reading this, we will not use an antiquated notion in our descriptions that pertain to the development of conscious such as words “good and bad” as they pertain to the notion of good and evil. We will instead refer to bolstering development of one’s conscious versus destructive effects of one’s conscious. When you read the words “good” and “bad” utilized by us, they are just relative terms.

Within the realm of destructive forces that one allows to inhibit full development of their conscious, we would like to suggest that there are inner deterents and some of these manifest themselves in outward physical signs. Among the internal factors allowing or detracting growth from a conscious, outward signs would show once the growth has reached a certain level. If one’s conscious is inhibited, one will find physical manifestations of unfruitfulness, confusion, lack of direction and in worse case scenarios, danger of harm to oneself or others. Anything that is counterproductive to helping one be all that they were created to be we could refer to as bad in the sense that the ultimate place one would like to arrive at still lies ahead further. So “bad” is not bad but can now be seen as limiting. Let us look at some cause and effects of physical manifestations deeply rooted in inhibited conscious development.

If you are a smoker, you are going to be ultimately more prone to disease or illness than if you were not. So without inferring your choice is either good or bad, let’s look at it another way. You would not have to view your choice as detrimental as long as your end result can be reached. Logically, you had better work faster and make your life contributions more significant at a younger age due to the increased possibility that your life span will be lessened. So the actual flaw comes from acceptance of a cookie cutter philosophy which suggests that all actions culminating in physical depreciation to the human body is automatically considered bad or limiting.

Let’s look at another illustration of this point. If you are a workaholic and appear to be doing something positive for the world, one prone to judgement might not be so quick to condemn you as they would if you were a smoker. People generally think more time yields more progress, thus to cut short time means less progress. This is not necessarily the case. Life’s endeavors should be focused on quality rather than quantity. Let’s consider an old Chinese saying, “A life of a thousand years can be a tragedy. A life of a single day can be a triumph.”

If one uses work as a way to keep a mind and body busy in order to distract them from things they should be concentrating on for full enrichment of their lives, no one would really know but that individual. Their conscious decision to allow that course of action to go on is their greatest failure. As long as that failure continues their conscious is being held captive by the devices they’ve chosen to enslave it with. Nothing anyone else does or does not do can produce those effects in any given individual but the individual itself. The well-developed conscious cannot be tampered with easily by outside forces. When a conscious choice demonstrated by an action can be viewed by others, it serves to allow them the ability to create a label. You then have to ask yourself, “Does the label have any validity?” Given what we’ve just discussed the obvious answer is no. However, that does not change the scenario because the undeveloped conscious of others does not inhibit their ability to speak and carry on their lives. To develop our conscious we must develop the ability to disregard the things that come from less developed conscious sources. We must take in all that can be beneficial and good as related to the development of our conscious and develop the intellect and common sense that will become second nature as it guides us to blocking that which would deter our growth. Your attempt to guide your conscious development by analyzing outward results, effects and opinions from others would be about as effective as driving a car with a blindfold and having the person sitting next to you tell you what to do. Rather, all conscious development must well upward from within with no regard to comment or effect from others. Only the inner intentions of the people who are the navigators of where they are going and the bolstering or detracting factors that the decisions they make have on their conscious are relevant and useful. This sounds logical and easy to understand on paper but when mixed with emotion and real world circumstances it becomes the first thing to be forgotten.

Where does the source for the assumed need of self-modulation come from? In the early stages of the developing conscious, a natural tendency emerges to grant more weight toward embracing and following the ideas culminating from the overwhelming influence of society rather than from the void within. The true ability to rely on oneself to develop a conscious without these detrimental outside factors can only come once they are identified and understood for what they are and why they exist. The weak minded never get to this point. They only see benefit to the rules and laws that affect the most commonly agreed upon behavioral changes in others. They cling to the idea that as a united society, influence over the course of human activities is the only way to be beneficial to all. The true horror of this limited, shortsighted approach is that encouragement for true growth and productivity ultimately ceases to exist. The tendency to follow a pre-established direction down a road created by others with a supposed reward in store for all is alluring at first to an undeveloped conscious. If one works on conscious development simultaneously even while traveling down the road it can become clear that the reward is not designed for the individual but only those who encouraged them down that particular path. At this point a massive responsive lash back produces the exact opposite effect intended. This should come as no surprise – when we follow we are limited by, in this case, the collective undeveloped conscious of the world. We see a growing level of chaos and disorder in all societies today. It is our assertion that this is being caused by the subconscious’ lowest level reactionary instinct for self-survival. To try to make sense of the infinite expressions of all would be fruitless.  Instead, the simple identification of this process occurring all around us must be self-noted in order to be beneficial in the developing of the abilities necessary to steer oneself away from becoming a victim of the same entrapment.

I?can look back now on my childhood and realize that I did make a conscious choice to attempt to consciously identify my place in the world and my relation to my Creator. In the infancy of my developing conscious at that time, I?realize how much was rooted in the stereotypical two-sided fight of the conscious that you see depicted in cartoons with the little devil on one shoulder and the little angel on the other whispering in my ears. Much can be learned from analyzing why this approach exists and why the nature of it is so black and white. All human nature gravitates naturally towards order of the masses as a self-protective mechanism. All aspects of human life fall victim to being placed in one of two categories – right or wrong. In the hands of man, the idea of right and wrong has been utilized only as a servant of fear and neglectfulness toward the effort that should naturally take place in the development of one’s conscious. Black or white, good or bad and right or wrong is the easy way. Though the allure of the common collective may seem beneficial, it does not make clear to the undeveloped conscious all that it has power to destroy. The fragility of the potential value of the treasure that lies in the untapped true potential of each individual’s conscious cannot be overstated.

From my own experience, even as a child I consciously saw more meaningful benefit originating from paths that were rooted in paying homage to a Creator. I then naturally gravitated towards those paths as I?became aware of all the wondrous and infinitely complex levels that logically that Creator would have desired me to explore and develop into. I, therefore, attributed all that I was given and developed into as part of the natural gift that I was given by the Creator. So many people receive the gifts they are given and summarize them as chance or evolution. What this does is basically allow a person to follow any path imaginable including paths of self- destruction and destruction to others with out any means of logically assessing what they are doing.  I shudder to think that most individuals in this world are exactly that way and it has become my cause to find within and with me a way to utilize my life force to counteract that fact.  

It became obvious to me the inherent limitations of allowing myself to be subservient to faulty shortsighted systems of categorization long ago. I became all about comparative analysis. My wife really helped me with this though I assume she was not consciously trying to or even aware of it.  I would come to her with results of studies I had performed and she would dismiss them. In my early years I assumed I was just off and must go back and recalculate. This gave rise to a massive innter analytical ability and building process that, ironically, did not have to take place at all but it was a good thing it did. I turns out that what happened was that I gave her too much credit at a time when she was not fully develped enough to completely comprehend or analyze the merits of my own thoughts and conclusions. She simply did not understand what I was saying and did not want her life complicated by such matters at the time so she dismissed it all away each time I confronted her.  Her vessel was not prepared to receive what I had to give. The miss-match of our conscious awareness and ability was a huge dehabilitating factor in our lives and my allowing for it by my wish to meld with her rather than dominate has rendered gargantuan gifts that are now flowing over the brim. But because of the path we have walked in the meantime the beneficial manifestation of the gift in our lives were having much difficulty coming out.  Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” I?escaped for the first time the clutches of the hobgoblin at the tender age of five. My wife bolstered me more and I became all about the conscious and the analysis that led to development of it. I was anything but consistent. I was only consistent in my non-consistency and re-evaluation at every turn.

From this moment on, I literally became about analyzation. Later on the two opposite voices merged into one and I realized that all things could work together for positive progression toward an end result if that end result is the development of conscious. Even mistakes and failure could be beneficial. I am not saying that I cannot fail myself from time to time. I am saying that what I used to call failure only slows me down or redirects me now but does not inhibit my growth. If I make a mistake, I learn from it and have come to see it as an old layer of residue of effects from past failures I must continue to peel off and move beyond. I do not view everything and every decision in terms of whether it is a failure or not as I did in my early conscious development as a child. It is not amusing that some people go through their entire lives with the old fashioned cartoon view of conscious. Living a life of rigidity and judgment is the only place that view will ever lead and certainly not to a developed conscious. I had to allow failure to teach me that. From time to time I even allowed what I thought might be a failure ahead of time to be consciously explored. My developing theory was rooted in the idea that every thought and thing can serve for positive growth if the perspective you have is what it needs to be. So I came to see that things I?previously thought were failures that would slow me down could actually serve to open my eyes and show me more positive growth. I was only able to do that when I saw that the idea of labeling it as a failure was in itself the flaw. It then became empowering when what I used to see as a flaw was shown to be yet more potential for growth. I came to see that when the growth of the conscious became self-confident enough to guide its way past traps that the undeveloped conscious falls into on a regular basis, I was able to leap past obstacles and find rewards that would enhance growth even further. To be effective I had to be able to do this with the right perspective.

If one thinks strongly enough that he is failing himself, he will fail himself. Perspective is everything. When everything you do is done for your conscious benefit, you will have the confidence to go down every road and know positive growth will be found there. Failure and flaw is only what keeps you back from developing your conscious to all that it can be. What insights can I share that would help you move forward positively even with flaw and failure? You made an inferior original judgement at some point which was rooted in your undeveloped conscious regarding what flaw and failure were in the first place. You need to throw out what you thought you knew that once held the power to hold you back. Once you re-evaluate and understand the origins and influences that guided your conscious’ choices in the past, you will find renewed confidence that you can build roads around current obstacles.

If you believe in a universal force, use that outward belief to help you look inward. If you do not believe in a universal force, maybe it still governs your way and conscious regardless of your limited perspective. You have to accept that as a viable possibility in order to allow yourself the freedom that you need to explore new roads. If you do not have this freedom you will find yourself trapped by the roads made by others and you will be limited to only achieving the same results as those that have come before you. When you look towards seemingly noteworthy individuals of the past and present and their collective bodies of works it can be intimidating for you to believe that you can individually reach similar high levels in the things that you do. The only thing an artist can do is help others develop understanding and insights that can help you understand the value in all things. Nothing valuable can be created because all things of value already exist. Only the ability to see things for what they are and find the value in them is the tool you need to develop.

Of the many that have looked inward and allowed their conscious and visions to mold and sculpt their works through physical manifestations to be shared with others, a plethora of descriptive views and ideas reside in the works of art, music and literature. These are all just means to an end that will serve only to add additional confusion and certainly no insight to an unprepared conscious with a misguided perspective. So not only can your own conscious lead you astray if not properly developed and maintained but the works of others can also further complicate your understanding and perspective of all things. The ultimate thing that a person must do is to understand his conscious and in that explanation find a way to translate what is happening to others within one’s life. Only at that point can you develop and benefit from the works of others through analytical abilities you have developed. The works of artists, musicians and literary masters to the developed conscious hold no higher ability to learn and grow than the study of failures around you made by those of undeveloped conscious.

When you get to this point that I have been describing in this chapter, and you realize that you have hit the same wall as the artists, musicians and scholars, I want to offer you a further course to take. I want to show you the way around the blockade. Once the true artist realizes that there is nothing to create, but rather their efforts lie in the area of understanding and communicating to others what is and how it can be viewed in order to be beneficial, true fruits can come. Once you realize that nothing new can be created, your mission now becomes the same as every other person who has ever broken through this wall – to express and share with others ideas, perspectives and beliefs and new ways of viewing the same things that all people contemplate. In so doing, your ultimate objective should be to analyze the shortcomings of others’ works and take aim at a vastly higher goal that is not founded in the creation of new ideas. Nor is it founded in praise that comes from the elevation of another’s thoughts of you and your works. Instead, your creativity allows you to offer unique tools to other individuals uniquely designed from your analytical abilities to aid the conscious of your fellow human beings subject to the same circumstances as yourself. This is the greatest thing one person can do for another and what this book is about.