Hope for a Happy New Year!

Here's my hope for all of us, that 2015 will be a year when Happiness, Peace and Freedom sprouts all over the world, and the idea of America comes back into our consciousness and lives again!

 And I do have some good reason to feel so hopeful.

I believe it is well known to anyone with an attentions span of more that 15 minutes, that our commercial media is full of lies. That the media is not doing it's constitutional function of providing important information to the citizenry to maintain a democratic form of government. This is not because the media is only in the business of selling "eyeballs" for advertisers. It goes much deeper than that, as Robert Parry has stated in his article "The Victory of Perception Management":

"To understand how the American people find themselves trapped in today’s Orwellian dystopia of endless warfare against an ever-shifting collection of “evil” enemies, you have to think back to the Vietnam War and the shock to the ruling elite caused by an unprecedented popular uprising against that war.

While on the surface Official Washington pretended that the mass protests didn’t change policy, a panicky reality existed behind the scenes, a recognition that a major investment in domestic propaganda would be needed to ensure that future imperial adventures would have the public’s eager support or at least its confused acquiescence.

This commitment to what the insiders called “perception management” began in earnest with the Reagan administration in the 1980s but it would come to be the accepted practice of all subsequent administrations, including the present one of President Barack Obama.

In that sense, propaganda in pursuit of foreign policy goals would trump the democratic ideal of an informed electorate. The point would be not to honestly inform the American people about events around the world but to manage their perceptions by ramping up fear in some cases and defusing outrage in others – depending on the U.S. government’s needs."

But now we have the antidote to this poisoned stream of information.  

Below is a video of a TED Talk given by James Corbett about what the media may look like in the near future.  Open Source Journalism, as he explains it in "The Net is Mightier than the Sword":

Here is the result of the open source journalism on the MH17 crash on his website The Corbett Report:

Crashes of Convenience: MH17

As we've been told before "Truth shall set you free".  Lets support, promote and encourage this very promising form of information distribution.

May we all have a very Happy, Fruitful and Peaceful 2015!

Pass the word!

Sincerely,

Bob

Still making sense

Bill Still points out, in this very short video, the root causes of our present economic problem.  He points directly at where the problem is so it is perfectly clear.  (check out his channel and subscribe to his newsletter if you can.  He's doing good work)




We don't have to be afraid of the hardships that will inevitable arise as we go into the future, because this same "hardships" will be the vehicles through which we will arrive at viable, just, and peaceful solutions.

ALL of us participating in the recovery.

Pass the word!

Love

Bob

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) 

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

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

We all are one

In my last post I tried to show what I believe is a viable way to tackle the problems we have on Earth from a pretty esoteric point of view, so it's not likely that many will be able to understand and/or believe what I said.  

A while ago, my very good friend Viktor Vos and I recorded a piece of music that I think explains very well where my views come from.  It's a short 4:31 minutes video.  If you can, close your eyes and see if you can find the "spot".  If you were to persist, eventually, you'll find it.  You'll need to train your Ego to stay quiet for a while (all that chattering going on in there)  When you find it, you'll see/feel a very pleasant "place". 

Enjoy it.

We all are one

Love

Bob