Insight

I ordered YourselfFitness last week after hearing about it on a video game review site.  It’s a virtual personal trainer software that I can’t recommend enough.  Very professional, when you start a new account you go through an approximately 30 minute fitness evaulation to ‘build’ the workout that is right for you.  It includes over 500 exercises and a 4500 meal planner based on the calorie intake you want.  The meal planner includes a printable shopping list and directions to prepare them.  If you have work out equipment (hand weights, step platform, stability ball, heart rate monitor) the workouts will design itself around that.  There is also a meditation garden for doing yoga work outs.  The program can be paused at any time and a 3-d model can be rotated around to ensure you are doing the exercises correctly.  Yourself fitness keeps track of your progress, adjusts the work out routine based on your responses to questions, and gives you a hard time if you miss a day. 

I’ve only had a chance to use the software three times so far (not counting the evaluation) and it is quite a work out for me.  I have it set up for alternating days-and I plan on doing weight lifting and yoga on odd days.  The game is for PC, PS2, and XBOX.  Ebgames has the ps2 version for order from their website.  I went with the PC version because I can take the program with me easily when my computer is upgraded, and I can use it via my laptop.  My laptop has S-video out so I can readily plug it into a larger T.V.  The software cost about $29.99, and is highly rated by both gaming sites and by health magazines (such as prevention). 

I’m a beginner-well that’s even giving myself too much credit, for most of these exercises.  It’s a lot more comfortable to do them in a closed room than look silly trying to do them in public-especially with the yoga.

What makes human beings unique amongst most other life on earth is our ability to better our fellow man.  Language and invention are clear signs that this is our most specific trait.  When chased by a lion, invention gives the advantage in a single lifetime-what would take genes many generations to evolve.  If we look at humanity in this way, what makes man most fit-is his ability to make others more fit.  Conversely, the least fit man is he who is either unable or unwilling to help others.

Racism and other forms of prejudices stand as a cruel mockery of this truth.  To see one as inferior, is to see one that you cannot help rise up.  The egoist may find themselves a more fit person, but they do not condemn another as less fit.  The racist defaces himself as impotent when it comes to his fellow man for he must say to himself-’I am unable to better this human being’.  Perhaps there are many reasons for his belief, but this is the end result.  There is no one less fit to serve humanity than one who chooses not to.   

[The All,7]

quick poem just wrote about how I see myself trying to make sense of all the nuances of humankind.  Where they came from, where they’re going.  At the end I’m trying to give the sense that rather than actually learning anything or making anything new-it feels more like I’m unlearning and trying to forget all that I’ve been conditioned to accept.  Devolving is an appropriate term.  A blank slate is just that blank.  Imagine trying to rewrite a language from scratch, could you come close to having one near the size of an every day dictionary before your time expires?

Revise
——

Step into my dungeon mind,
where eyes are fluff dotted
and whispers underlined.
Into horrorshows of green and black,
my soul stretches,
yet gives little slack.

Green is the season,
beginnings my friend.
yet black turns the winter,
always to the end.

Watching wilting flowers
with dream stained visions,
another climbs up the towers
the multitudes submissions.

Different is a trait
lost to early adulthood
when differents become psychotics
just misunderstood.

Battled so long against comformity,
that now much conflict is meaningless.
conventional handshakes are a mystery-
as are ‘bless you’ replies to a sneeze,
or ‘thanks’ and ‘would you please’.
forgone, would they notice something amiss?

Isolated and unlearning
de-volution my mind is churning
language reborn in one-zero grunts
minor are the challenges
the revisionist confronts.

One cannot kill an idea or a dream.  It can be stifled, the vessel can be done away with-but the idea and dream will resurface so long as it is meant to do so.  The truth does not turn away for any person or group of people.  As such, an immortality is granted to all thought-all feeling. 

The oppressed man may strive for freedom today, and not find it-but someone like him one day will.  An inventor can spend years on a machine that never bares fruit-but his brother or sister of the soul one day will.  Look not to life as an entirety, but as a collection of moments.  Just as one act of goodness does not a good person make, so should one failure not make ones life a travesty.  See each thought, each wish, and each attempt as unique.  These aspects of you when brought down to their individual self-contained states are shared throughout many, if not over today-then over time.  Take comfort that these will live on.

Each moment of each day is a scene that we divest ourselves in entirety too.  It guides our actions and thoughts.  Is it not also so with our dreams?  Shaped by a stage of unknown design.  Take comfort that the stage will live on.

Does it matter if the age, the sex, or the face of the person who reaches the finish line differs from your own-if the drive and the thought are the same?  Say that you share this piece of your soul with the world, and rejoice that this truth shall come to pass-and is immortal and right.

[Eternity,5]

Sin does not come from within, it comes from without.  Out of ignorance we can act as a conduit for sin.  No one person is responsible for the world around him or her.  We are born into the world from which sin persists like a virus.  Some of us are born more immune to the ravages of this disease than others.  Societies beliefs serve as an imperfect inoculation, constantly perfected as we evolve.  This does not disavow a sinner from their actions, it simple reminds us of our own role in the sin.  During punishment, we are not judging the sinner alone-we are also judging that part of humanity that we share-that part that allowed the sin to occur.  We should never forget that the sin is born from this world of ours-and as such we all share in the responsibility.

[The All,6]

There is no single apocalypse or creation.  Eternity is timeless as the Lord is timeless.  The end and the beginning are happening all the time thoughout our mode of comprehension.  The events leading towards the end are occuring simulataneously with the events leading us towards the beginning.  Time is only an attempt at understanding the world around us.

Sin, evil, crime, war, hate-pervade the world around us.  They wax and wan throughout the months and seasons, occasionally bubbling up into a greater movement upon the social consciousness.  So too however do we find love and peace.  We cannot point to a single moment in time and say clearly, here begun man-or here ends man.  Without relating one incidence of evil versus one incidence of good together, by treating them as seperate and unqiue incidences-it becomes possible to say that the world ends and begins a million times a day.

When we set off a firework, when does the fire work go off?  When we purchase and position the fire work?  When we lay down the fuse?  When we light the fuse?  When the firework lifts into the sky?  When the firework explodes?  Remove any single action in the chain and the firework would not go off, so why should one event be viewed as more important than the other?  In a murder trial to we seperate the death of the women from the gun that fire the bullet from the loading of the bullet and pulling the trigger?  Why then should the end of days be considered differently.  In an infinite universe there is no one single point for the end, for the end is always occuring around us.  The same is true with creation, with death comes birth and all the events that lead up to the birth.

The world of man is always being created and is always dying.  The end is occuring as much today as it will tomorrow-creation is occuring as much today as it did as far back in time as we can recall.

[Eternity,4]   

The knowing of a thing and understanding serve unique purposes.  Knowing a thing is how you relate its existence to the universe around you.  Understanding a thing is how you relate its existence to the universe within your self.  You can know a pitcher quite readily from past experience.  Understanding the pitcher, even as simple as it may seem is built from more complex experiences-though the knowledge does not change.  The pitcher could be art, a decoration for the homestead.  The pitcher may be used to hold flowers within.  The pitcher may be used to pour tea.  Knowing the pitcher is an absolute, understanding the pitcher is infinite.  Therefore we should not seperate ourselves based on understanding.  What one man understands life to be compared to another mans is irrelevant.  What matters is that we know life is.

[The All,5]

It is a need within all of us to know a thing.  There is no right or wrong in knowing a thing, for the knowledge is as much a sense as that of touch, scent, sight or hearing.  If you could not use your senses to find an object before your eyes, does the object exist to you?  If you were incable of knowing a thing, through any of these senses or of the mind-would it exist?  Or would it be as an invisible creation always beyond your grasp?  You couldn’t recall seeing it before, for you do not know it.  You cannot say this reminds me of that.  It would forever be beyond the realms of your possible universe and may as well exist in another dimension.  So we know things and all knowledge is equal in the knowing.  Knowledge that has come before serves this purpose as much as knowledge that will come tomorrow.   

[The All,4]

Our understanding of the divine grows with time, though our knowledge that the divine exists has always been present.  In such a way we are all sinners when future generations understand the sins we only know to have commited today.  In similar suit we cannot hold the past as responsible for wrongs they have commited before understanding them.  Understanding a thing and knowing a thing are distinct.  It is similar to a sapling and a tree.  The sapling and the tree both know the sunlight.  As time passes the tree grows larger, but a tree alone gains no more sunlight than the sapling does.  For each branch, each limb must share in that light.  Such is the way of advancing our own understanding.

[The All,3]