A Midwest Journal

When I was going to college just a few years ago, I was in class with a younger associate who was astonished that I left the radio off when I traveled between cities across the Midwest. My reason: it gave me time to complete logical chains of thought I had going.

Of course, now I know even better.

Because all that noise just keeps you thinking. It doesn’t help your thinking or figure out how to quit thinking.

Today I threw out (gave away, actually) a 12-hour set of CD’s which cost me nearly a hundred bucks – because that person said in the third recording on the first CD: you can’t do anything about thinking, you can only change what you are thinking.

What a curve-ball.

For the past few days, I’ve been telling you all about Levenson and his Sedona Method. And been telling you how this enables you to quiet your mind and actually quit thinking as the bad habit (addiction, actually) it is.

Another lecture I was listening to today was on wealth building. Yes, that’s kind of a oxymoron all by itself – since your prosperity is already present. Now, he did give a lot of good mechanics on actions you can be informed about to help you with your inspired actions.

But this guy said the same thing many, many people before him said: you have to surround yourself with the tapes that will reinforce and create the world you want. And this is true.

True for those who can’t quit thinking.

I’ve covered this before in other material. It takes about 28 days of listening and re-listening to the same material or set of materials to change a habit. All thought is generally a habit. So if you want to change your mind, you simply change what you are listening to.

You see, most people are effect of the 50-60,000 thoughts that go through their mind in a 24-hour period. They can’t help but think. The breakthrough of the Sedona Method is that it quiets the mind. It allows you to not just think pleasant, joyous thoughts – by regulating your feelings as “The Secret” espouses – but actually to slow down the frequency of thoughts and get them to simply slow way, way down… and then — just stop.

Takes awhile. But you’ve been thinking your whole life, so cut yourself some slack.

Levenson talks on his early tapes that what you are actually doing is getting rid of the mind itself. (As I went over before.)

So why do you need to listen to these tapes? To reinforce your thought processes so that you always “think” in this new habit.

Sure, there is learning new techniques, new ways to accomplish things in this universe. But that is all working at a quite mechanical level, isn’t it.

This new approach is much simpler. If you just keep releasing, you get to the point where Levenson recommended – of simply releasing in order to get things to appear. Now, that is kind of drastic, isn’t it? And you are still going to get inspired action you have to do. Like suddenly calling someone – or turning down a certain street when you are driving somewhere – or stopping to go into a store you haven’t visited before.

Intuitive suggestion – inspiration. Same thing. Quiet your mind and these start coming to you.

Why is it so hard to develop intuition? Because most of use are thinking too hard at it.

Here’s your suggested program to follow:

• Turn off the TV for most of the day, if not all of it.
• Quit listening to audio CD’s and recordings – as well as DVD’s.
• Welcome and release any and all thoughts that come in. If they won’t release and are negative, release on being stuck – then go back and finish releasing them.
• Truth (true inspired intuition) won’t release, but you’ll recognize it for what it is.
• Achieve that inner, joyous, profound peace and maintain it. Any thoughts come in, just welcome and release them.

Do this plan for 30 days instead of anything else. Three times a day just purposely sit for awhile, motionless, relaxed – and release any thoughts that come in, quite in addition to releasing through the day as you go.

You’ll find that all the information you had earlier studied now comes to you as you need it. If there’s something foggy about it, some detail, then re-listen or re-read that material again. Often this will come as some sort of inspired idea as to a book or CD/DVD will suddenly come to you for something you should act on. Follow your bliss – act on your inspired intuitional glimpses.

And while there can be “relapses”, just figure that there is a lot of practice you’ve been going at for more years than you know in developing your thinking habit (at least from age 2) – so some additional thoughts coming in can easily be dealt with by welcoming and releasing.

OK? Have fun.

---

---

Thanks for visiting my blog and reading this entry.
If you’ve found it valuable, please consider donating via PayPal to enable my continuing research.

Or – buy a book from my “Go Thunk Yourself” bookstore.

Our latest upcoming release, “Freedom Is — (period.)”

---

My studies for this upcoming book (working title: “Freedom Is -”) has continued my research and uncovered some new material.

I was looking for simple evidence for the historical basis of the release technique Lester Levenson utilized in his Sedona Method. And of course, this evidence abounds in the works of various Masters, as well as prophets and scholars.

Today, I was checking out the oldest surviving active philosophy on this planet, the Hawaiian Huna. It’s seven principles I thought to be static, but instead they are actually quite fluid. The Hawaiian language as spoken depends on its meaning by how it is said.

Looking for more understanding about their 7 principles brought me a webpage by Vern at his “Aim for Awesome”. According to this post, the Huna philosophy is over 30,000 years old. And still in use today.

Vern gave me even more understanding of these points than I had gotten from Serge Kahili King. Simply because he was giving a more fluid translation.

Now in comparing this with the basics Levenson points out, here is another set, which I believe stays true to the underlying native concepts:

IKE
Our ideas create Reality.

KALA
We are all interconnected.

MAKIA
Energy flows to the focus.

MANAWA
Now is the moment of power.

ALOHA
Happiness is sharing your love.

MANA
All power comes from the Universal within.

PONO
Truths are as useful as proven.

You’ll see some stay the same. And some are reworded in American English just slightly without changing King’s version.

My point in doing this was to cross-check Levenson’s original work and especially some early tapes I just discovered in Larry Crane’s Abundance Course.

My idea is that any true principle would be timeless and found in all philosophies across the historical landscape. This has tended to prove out for all basic “laws” mentioned by popular self-help authors.

Out of this, I finally have a test-case “recipe” for Freedom:

Focus on sharing your love in the Now, and have all the energy and power of the Universal you can use.

A bit wordy, but I think it serves. When you are dealing with truly timeless qualities of such a broad subject, we’ve been needing something that fits beyond any political or governmental definition. Because true Freedom implies personal ability to have, do, or be anything and everything you set your sights on. Of course, this is best and only really accomplished by sharing the most creative substance in this Universe – Love.

And when you are looking for absolute Freedom, you are also looking right at absolute Happiness, as well as absolute Peace.

But go ahead, prove it for yourself…

---

---

Thanks for visiting my blog and reading this entry.
If you’ve found it valuable, please consider donating via PayPal to enable my continuing research.

Or – buy a book from my “Go Thunk Yourself” bookstore.

Our latest upcoming release, “Freedom Is — (period.)”

---

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ashevillein/

Somebody ought to give these guys a clue: put a sock in it so the rest of us don’t have to listen to your hysterical death moans.

While on the Internet the other day (my chief form of both livelihood and information), I was visiting right-of-center Real Clear Politics – who I adopted during the last three years of campaigning because they were the only ones who averaged all the polls.

I was astonished to find, after Tax Day, how many disparate and desperate opinion (not factual) pieces their were about what had happened. It went from twisted support to knife-twisted-in-back denial. Even commentary on commentary where Keith Obermann had used reportedly sexual innuendo to describe it.

Who cares? No, really – WHO CARES?!?

There is a reason that the NY Times is estimating a 30%+ loss in advertising revenue for the next year. There is a reason for the “Big City” newspapers going under at a record pace. There is a reason that people who watch the Network news are fewer and fewer by double-digit percentages. There was even a rumor that one of the two people who watch MSNBC and CNBC (they take turns) – actually fell asleep…

Relevance.

The mainstream media can’t get used to the fact that it’s dying. A very slow and painful death (at least for the rest of us.)

It’s not that people don’t care. They don’t care for the slant, the diatribes, the couched phrases, the unabashed support of certain liberal senators.

People don’t care who is the anchor for the evening news or what sex they are – they don’t watch it anyway. (Except for the reviewers and those employed by NBC, CBS, and ABC. But these are the mourners, not the rest of the passer-bys outside the cemetery on the sidewalk.)

People do care about what is going on and what is really happening. And they know that there is more than two sides to every story – and that anyone who thinks they are some sort of expert officiator is full of more manure than any herd out there. (And they are thinking about taxing farmers for cow gas – what about newscaster and politician gas?!?)

While the mainstream media is dying off, why are local papers (and local banks for that matter) doing just fine and even – gasp – expanding in this economy?

Relevance.

What’s on the local newspaper front page? What happened locally that day. What’s on page 3 or page 5? National and World News. Oh, there is a blurb which runs at the bottom if something important is happening. But covering the election – it’s how the local voter turnout went.

Some used to say that there were bubbles on each coast (probably connected by a very long tube) where all the “really important” stuff happened. And we in the middle were lucky enough just to capture bits and pieces and overviews of it – that we should feel honored that there were three news agencies who would digest it all and present it in half-hour segments each night at dinner.

Let’s get something straight. They’re nuts.

I watch TV for the weather and get my news from the Internet. And this means that I try to avoid the National News, since they don’t carry local weather. My family likes to catch the sports as well. But that’s it.

And our TV has to be propped up when any “Network News” is on, because they are so slanted, the TV would fall off the stand if it weren’t supported.

Impartial? Look, my dogs are impartial – as long as I feed them something they can eat and they have a dry spot to lie in. My cows are impartial – as long as they have plenty of pasture or hay and water (and I keep the dogs from chasing them). Try treating a “news person” that way.

But is that a fair comparison? Well, how do the news people treat me? “This political party is horrible; that political party is saving the day.” The government did this nonsense thing today, but when the business do the same nonsense thing yesterday, they covered it as some horrible sin against humanity. Some politicians and candidates are held up on pedestals, some others are held up to thinly veiled scorn.

Do I need real facts that I can judge for myself? Yes. Do I need to put up with noise and pandering and slanted diatribes couched as “fair, impartial journalism”? Hell, no.

So around this house the TV goes off except for the morning and evening weather. We get the local “big city” paper on Sunday. I have one favorite comic strip, my brother-in-law likes the want ads, my mother likes the opinion section and the recipes (only one of which soothes the stomach – guess which…)

What’s entertainment? Nothing on TV. What’s the commercials for their “hot, new shows” — people dying, getting killed, being investigated after being killed, investigations into killings that happened years ago, specials on people who are trying to save the planet (which is being killed….) And so on. Ad nauseum.

Or there are “reality shows”. Nope. People on remote islands and deserts doing stupid antics and trying to act like the TV cameras aren’t there. Do you see any camera in a trailer park seeing people raise their kids while they hold down two jobs and their grandmother makes sure the kids’ homework gets done? Nope. We see millionaire bachelors fooling around with 20 or more women and deciding to “marry” one of them. Yeah, that’s real. Or game shows where 20 or so girls with amplified bosoms and barely dressed holding briefcases so a bald guy can tease a person into saying and doing really stupid things to “win” something in those empty cases. That’s real high-brow.

How about comedy. Go ahead – find some. Most of the half-decent comedy reruns used to fill afternoon slots and now has been replaced by “Judge Jerky” and “Judge Korky” and ‘Law & Order” reruns from five years ago.

OK, there is one show we watch when we can get it – a game show where the host is actually polite and funny at times and people do nothing but win money if they can guess the words right. Nobody dies, no one gets investigated, no one’s in prison. No sex, no violence, nobody dies (some of the jokes fall flat, but that’s no crime…)

Sure, there’s plenty of all that on the Internet as well, you could say. But there is also a lot of everything else as well – tons more. And the choice itself is relevance.

And yes, we used to watch Fox News and the Discovery Channel and even CSPAN – until some boobs decided to take it off the big dish – and we tried the small dish for awhile and got tired of paying for 20-30 channels of stuff we didn’t want for the 2 or 3 we did.

It’s cheaper to just watch what we want – local news and local weather – then turn it off the rest of the time.

Why, oh why do I have to listen and watch what some cock-eyed TV or newspaper executive – someone who has probably never had to change his own flat tire, or grow his own vegetables, or raise chickens for the eggs and stew them when they got too old – much less rescue a healthy calf that was born in an unseasonal blizzard, and raising them to a good weight only to sell them off at auction a year later.

No, most of these guys grew up in some suburb and then moved into a condo or apartment where they don’t even have a yard – working in another high-rise across town (so to speak) where they listened to other people in suits who spoke from “on high” about what advertisers thought people wanted to hear on those magic boxes in their living rooms.

And the “down their nose” attitude toward the rest of the country is infectious and spreads like the plague up and down the halls of those palatial boardrooms and studios.

Does anybody really care that Keith Obermann pouted until he got a door with a window in it for his new office? Hell, no.

- – - -

Here’s a reality show I’d like to see: get all those newscasters and TV personalities and line them up in front of a series of “pre-owned” cars. No, get some real used ones. You know, the ones where nobody cares to wax them any more because it would point out the rust spots worse.

Make sure they are dressed up in their usual suits and blouses and whatnot. Give them all a wireless mic so they think they know what they are doing. Then tell them it’s a contest and they have to change that flat tire on the car behind them, get it started and drive it to the filling station 5 miles away. Good luck.

I’m often talking out loud to my Senator or the President or one of these news anchors as I’m on the third day of fixing a section of fence the rain took out last fall and the wind dropped a couple of trees on during the winter. Do any of these guys look like they could even start a chain-saw, much less run one for a few hours? How about splicing barbed-wire? Know how to herd cattle just on your lonesome and two half-trained dogs without spooking them or losing any calves? Do they know what to do with a steer who’s got bloated up from eating too much wet clover in the spring?

I’ll swap them for their job almost any day – for awhile, anyway. I could do what they do with no problem. Write some stories and read them off in front of a robot camera. Nothing to it. Really. But it would be harder on me, because I know they wouldn’t take care of my herd and I’d be way behind when I got back because they wouldn’t know how to get the equipment ready for this season’s planting.

AND – they’d get all the good food, while I would have to make do with a bunch of stuff shipped in from thousands of miles away and was about as fresh as the bottom of my boots. (Would smell nicer, though…)

- – - -

Yes, I’m the same Dr. Robert C. Worstell who has a PhD and 7 other degrees. So don’t get all snooty with me. I’ve written, edited, and published around 4 dozen books and keep up with (more or less) another two dozen blogs – that I personally post to, not some scriptwriter down a long hall somewhere. I’ve given speeches, podcasts, videos – been there, done that.

But I also know how to drive a dual-axle 10-speed transmission, a John Deere tractor with a couple less (and two of those are reverse) – and which cover crops will bring back soil fertility in a worn-out flood plain.

And I know better than to take a tour bus into the middle of a corn field in Iowa in order to “get a story” about a combine and corn harvest, only to get stuck in soft ground (not even mud.)

Oh, come on. Same folks who got a corn picker and a combine mixed up last year (“reporting” some tragic accident from the year before). Heard the same story all day, about 5 or 6 times – somewhere in there it was corrected, at least by dinner. This was on national news – not the local channel. They’d have more sense.

- – - -

Do I know about big cities? Sure – I lived in L.A. for over 20 years. Right downtown Hollywood – not in those suburbs. So I’ve seen the crime, and the pimps, and ho’s, and “bruthah’s”, and the rich and famous as well. Porn peddled on the street corners and dirt almost everywhere (except when there is a premiere where they sweep it up and hose it down and put some red carpets over it.) The bums are back the next day, just as soon as the crews take down the velvet ropes.

Which do I prefer? Guess. Where did I make more money? Guess. Does money buy happiness or accurate news reporting? Don’t even have to flip a coin on that one.

So these news guys and gals should take a hint or two:

1. Get a real job, get a real life.
2. Go do something nice for someone for a change. Quit talking everything and everyone down because your ‘spozed to’.
3. Get a real yard and plant a real garden. Raise some tomatoes and lettuce, maybe some sweet corn.
4. Meanwhile, put a sock in it and j-u-s-t – s-h-u-t – u-p, would you?

---

---

Thanks for visiting my blog and reading this entry.
If you’ve found it valuable, please consider donating via PayPal to enable my continuing research.

Or – buy a book from my “Go Thunk Yourself” bookstore.

Our latest upcoming release, “Freedom Is — (period.)”

---