Creed exercise

My top three beliefs are that firstly any and all forms of killing outside of survival when neccessary, are usually wrong. Also, I believe fundamentally that all living beings can feel pain as we do, and should be treated as such. Last but certainly not least I believe that all things are possible, and belief is the key to impossible tasks.

For the first, I believe this as over time I have seen and learnt about the world, some of the good in it as well as some of the injustices. Now thinking about many of the reasons living things are killed, carelessness and for luxury being the two I find most vexing, very few of these are justified. Only survival can really be justified, and that does not include eating chicken or beef or something for dinner, as there are ways of not killing and still eating healthily. The only possibility is genuine survival, but then morally, does your survival outweigh the survival of whatever creature/s you have to kill to survive? Now for beings that are unable to make that distinction, or have a higher understanding which they can prove or justify, I am willing to make the exception. For example, if I see a cat eating a fish I will not get annoyed, because the cat can clearly not make the distinction, or the cat has an understanding above ours which includes all the sides of my arguement and also other arguements that defeat my own. How I came to believe this is through the process of originally, me finding out about issues regarding killing, pandas, poaching, seal clubbing etc. Now this is clearly unjustifiable from my point of view, so when at a later stage you take it further, considering that clear right and wrong with modern day activities, such as the food we eat, it then changed my belief. Then, over time as I considered or was presented with more arguements, and expanded my own belief’s, these slowly evolved and expanded to include what it does today. As an example that I usually fall back on in my own mind if I start to doubt my beliefs, I use the fact that seal clubbing is to me obviously wrong; then how is the seal’s pain and the wrong of those deaths different from other animal’s pain, and there deaths?

My second belief, that all living beings feel pain as we do, and should be treated as such, I believe because we can clearly see, if for instance I was to set light to a dog’s fur, it is clearly going to be in pain. It would react as if in pain and nobody would deny that for the dog it is a painful experience. Undoubtedly, to my mind, me causing that pain is wrong. Now if we as a species, Humans, didn’t feel pain, I would not understand the concept and therefore I would not believe it wrong. But if I do feel pain, and I then compare what I and others feel, we can sympathise with the pain the dog is feeling and understand this pain, and as a result of this understanding we can now realise that this is wrong. Now if I say the dog feels pain on a different level to us, lesser or higher, this starts to lose it’s meaning and we don’t realise the pain the dog would actually feel. Therefore, judging from the fact we can see the dog is in pain, and our own understanding of pain, the dog is feeling pain like we do, therefore it feels pain as we do normally. Now if I was to set light to a person, this would be called wrong. So, we cannot set light to people on moral grounds for the pain it causes them, which I agree with. As the dog feels pain as we do, it is clear to me, that the logical step is that it is wrong to cause the dog pain because it is wrong to cause us pain. As such, we should treat it the same way as we would treat each other simply because of the mutual pain that we both would rather not experience.

Thirdly, I believe that all things are possible and belief is the key to impossible tasks. I defy you to name one truly impossible task. For example, belief is the key to impossible tasks because if you believe, for instance, you could become the president, and you utilise that belief by pouring all your energies into that dream efficiently enough, it will happen. If you do the same but do not believe it is possible, you will almost certainly fail. Not guaranteed though, it is possible you will succeed. It is possible that you will wake up tomorrow and it will be christmas day. It is possible you will wake up tomorrow and there will be two moons and cows will be pink with purple spots. It is possible, just highly unlikely. I came to believe this from several incidents and meeting people. I used to be an obvious pessimist, but meeting people and talking to them, and considering various scenario’s, I now think of myself as more of a realist, a genuine realist rather than a pessimist. For example, I now that genuinely anything is possible, that is real. It is unlikely, but possible. Or it is likely, but it might not happen. Comparing all these fictional scenarios, or real ones a few times, as well as my more upbeat personality I came to believe this. My last example, is rather ironic because in the past it always used to be my final arguement for why all things were not possible, that some things were forever impossible. Can you jump to the moon? If you had steps you could. In one jump? Now that seems fairly conclusive, but all those little possibilities are present. For instance, in the future I might be able to. I could using some technology, or a very powerful cannon, however impractical the two might be. Even barring them, on your own, this instant, no help or delays. The moon could shoot down towards me. The earth could shoot towards the moon. I might suddenly be able to do it, some freak of nature that is a mutation or just luck which for some reason or other allows me to break the boundaries of the human body.

It’s not impossible, just very, very unlikely.

Jamas.

Why Jedi?

PART ONE-

I was first inspired by the Jedi path as a personal last laugh in the face of defeat really. I wasn’t exactly at the best stage in my life, to put it plainly I was pretty down, bordering on depression. I was spending months on the internet and google, I was trying my absolute hardest to find answers to questions that were pointless. I wanted to become fitter than anybody else, I wanted to become smarter, I wanted to become better because I was unhappy with myself as I was. Sort of like when an anorexic person looks in the mirror, I would look in the mirror and see someone who I didn’t want to be, rather than thinking I was fat I just thought I was awful. So, you can guess, using google and all of the how-to’s out there that at the end I hardly felt a lot better. What did I do? Naturally I gave up, but as a last sort of mocking myself, I thought about how I was almost trying to become a jedi. Well, one more google search wouldn’t hurt, besides there were jedi churches. Basically I typed in “Real Jedi Knights” and RJK came up. I committed myself to it, and since then have expanded my knowledge of orders, and inevitably I ended up here.

Suffice to say I was satisfied with my training, if not a bit impatient. I seem to remember hovering anxiously over my joining application waiting to be approved. It felt like forever, though since then I haven’t seen anyone validated as quickly as I was. Weeks later, I set out my long term goals, months in advance, and I was able to do the training, and feel that I was improving, not daily by any means, but I know that I am improving, and to say it truthfully I have become attached to my training.

PART TWO-

I think I require someone to do two things before I call them a jedi, and they can’t skip either of them. Firstly, they have to want the title, for however well they fulfill the other requirement, if they don’t want to be called a jedi then they are not. Simple. The other part is they must be serious about real life problems and training. They must be serious about helping the world, or just individuals in the way they choose, and they must be serious about doing their training to the best of their abilities. Personally, the thing that I most aspire to about the fictional jedi is their knowledge and more importantly how they know people, they can judge them and help them, and in a way manipulate them but without causing harm to anyone, or making the other person feel different in anyway. However to be a real jedi hinges more on what I said above, to want to be a jedi, and to be dedicated to jedi training and your personal, selfless goals.

PART THREE-

I will tell you that I dislike giving myself definite goals, and that is no secret. Here, well I plan to progress as best I can, take as many classes as I can without going so fast I don’t learn anything, and generally learn. Elsewhere my goals are more elaborate, particularly as many decisions of people I know and don’t know yet, and may never know, decide my future incredibly. The one thing that is certain is that I intend to progress at all of these orders in some way, if possible, by October 2010. However it is more complicated than that for me. Instead of it being a relatively simple matter of Yes, No, reasons for, reasons against and problems, I have one fact only that matters: myself. I need to do these things, and the biggest problem is nothing but getting myself to do them. I’m my own worst enemy, so to speak.

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As I look over this it does feel rather strange. I feel inspired, like I can do this easily and I will do so. I feel quite shocked, look at all I have to do, look at all I want myself to do, not because of it being needed. Even more so I am astounded by how I have managed to express my own opinions on matters that I usually stay away from like they’re a disease because, truth be told, sometimes my own answers worry me.

Force exercise

Hello.

When taking the “Discover your psychic type” test, I came up with the answer that I am emotionally intuitive. Second was mentally intuitive, and to be honest the names of those categories alone give me the impression, before the test, of being relevant to me. Reading through the emotionally intuitive section I was astounded by how much that test appears to relate to me personally, intimate feelings and states of mind that were explained so intimately. I’m unsure how to feel knowing that I can be explained like that when I have trouble explaining myself to myself, though it also makes me feel more secure, and safer knowing that I can take a step back and look at myself, albeit with some help. Luckily for me, it also says some of the potential flaws in emotionally intuitive people, which happen to be things where I do well as well, such as needing a mentally intuitive person for the bigger picture. As secondarily I am a mentally intuitive person who can do these things fairly well it is quite nice to know that I know my potential problems and how to overcome them.

 

Now, as for the meditation “The Lighthouse” I’ll readily admit to tampering with this a bit. Rather than using the beach as my starting point, something that caused small difficulty, I changed it to an aspect of my past that you may not understand, but to me it does the job of the beach much better, as it stirs much deeper and more profound emotions. It also stops my mind wandering, it focuses it on the memory and on details that it tries to recall, rather than thinking of time or meditation in general. As it darkens, I call upon more emotions, linked to this, and they are once again very deep, and I can feel it surging through my conciousness, but for once it is more controlled, it is there in it’s full power, yet it cannot affect me, somehow. It isn’t the same as pleasant, feeling these emotions, but it is less severe, less painful than they ever were before. Overall it is probably the best single meditation I have experienced. It worked best and it felt better than any previous ones. Afterwards I could feel a warmth, one that has many names, is famous yet also personal to everyone, it is unique to each person but universally recognised.