Friday, September 12, 2014

A Message for all Mankind - Charlie Chaplin

A very appropriate message for this time:




Pass the word!  And let's go out there and do the work!

Love

Bob

This Time






In this 13th anniversary of the “second Pearl Harbor”,  here's a music video we just finished that asks some relevant questions about our awareness of this time we are going through.

Pass it on if you think it worthy.

Thanks.

Music by Viktor Vos
Text and voice by Bob Ocegueda
Video by sebastiansz and Filme für die Erde (check their YouTube channels) 

Tuesday, September 9, 2014

The Space Within



This post is in response to a question a friend of mine asked about the previous post.

 “How do you wake up?”

Good question. I asked that question myself many times. What I've come to understand, from my own experience, is that "to be awake" means to be present, to be "here", at the present time. This is difficult because we normally act from the Ego mental center, or "the interpreter" as Gazzaniga calls it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJKloz2vwlc , and that means that our perception of what is happening now are being analyze, sorted, and categorize before we even become aware of what is happening (all this analyzing is done in a fraction of a second before we become aware of it)... so when we act, we quite often act "inappropriately" to what the situation calls for. Where possible fear and pain will make a rejector response and the possibility of pleasure will make an attractor response.

What we have to learn is to perceive the world around us without the "filters" our mind uses. Break the habit of acting from that Ego center, the "interpreter".

 And that can only happen by training our mind to do otherwise. That is the metaphor being used in the “Wake Up” video. The training consists on paying attention to what your mind is doing. You do that through meditation. Any of the many forms of meditation. In which you try to keep the mind quiet by focusing in your breathing. Then observing how the verbal mind, the chattering mind, usually on the left hemisphere, keeps producing thought messages. Pretty soon you can actually “see” where those thoughts originate inside your head. You can go back to quiet by re-focusing on your breath again. (With no reproaches about “How bad I am for not being able to stay quiet” and so forth). What I did was to "look" at the right side of my head and try to observe from that side, although, in time, I “saw” that the “right” side included my heart. (I haven't heard of any meditation methods that use this procedure, but it works for me).

Eventually, we are able to operate from this “new” center of perception at all times. This is when we can feel the environment we are in, literally, it is a sensual experience, instead of thinking about the environment we are in. It is a small and subtle difference of seeing with our mind, as opposed to seeing with our awareness. You'll be able to know this difference through experience. It can not be done intellectually. Then we can say we are awake. And what we see is really like a “new world” because of the absence of the perception filters we are used to.

It seems like hard work... No... it IS hard work!, but it gets easier as you go along.  Personally, I can not say that I am fully awake, because I still slip into old habits of mind perception from time to time, but I can stay in the right side of perception for longer periods of time.  It is getting easier all the time.

Other forms of waking up are like what the Native Americans used, from sweat lodges, to long, lone treks out in the desert (as Jesus did), to the experience of pain (as in that ceremony they had where the young man would be hung by hooks on his chest. Ugh, I'll stick to meditation) Some people report this type of changes after surviving traumatic situations. The use of psychedelic substances will also break up the perception habits and show a different train of perception. The danger here is that, unlike the old shamanic cultures, we tend to treat these substances as “entertainers”, where in a healthy environment they would be used as “teachers”. These substances open unused “windows” of perception, they are not “portals” through which we can walk through. The hard work of training your mind still needs to be done in a lucid state.

 Looking at death in the face is also likely to snap you out of the hypnotic trance  :-)   but I would not recommend that method.

In any case, this video “The Space Within” attempts to pass a little bit of this information.

Thanks for the question.

 Love

 Bob

Monday, September 8, 2014

Wake Up

Here is a song my friend Viktor and I made to explore our inner space.




This story was inspired by the book “The Brain's Past”  by Michael Gazzaniga where he lays out clearly the two paths of perception.  There is a good video of one of his lectures in YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJKloz2vwlc

We need to learn how our mind is working. 
We used to say “it's all in the mind”, remember?  Now we say it's all “internal work”. 

That's all we need. 
Learn how our mind is working. 
Individually, nationally and species-wise.
So we can make the right choices.

Love

Expand the field of awareness. 

Pass the word. 

Thanks.

Bob

Music by Viktor Vos
Lyrics and voice by Bob Ocegueda