Counteract the Bad Energy

My first thought after reading the Wikipedia entry for Bernie Madoff was, "I'm gonna get on the next NJ Transit and go strangle this man." The fact that he made bail with only half of the co-signers present, and then he violated his assets-freeze by sending a million dollars worth of jewelry to his relatives, and that he still lives in a penthouse most human beings could only dream about... these things trigger my "strangle him" thoughts.

But those aren't productive thoughts, they're more of a biologically conditioned response. So, then I thought I might add some meager amount of positivity to the world. Certainly, blogging doesn't undo thirty years and billions of dollars worth of sinister behavior, but I think it's very important in today's global village to do what little things you can to combat feeling helpless in response to overwhelming global problems, of which there are oh-so-many cropping up.

With the discovery of the meme, it seems that in addition to following soon-to-be-Prez Barack's "spirit of service, spirit of sacrifice," which I will delve into wholeheartedly this year, we can also put some faith in acts of webbiness. You can tug on any strand and shake a web. I try not to entertain too many delusions as to how many people out there are interested in reading a blog like this, but I do hope to impact a couple of people with my Tales of Bravery, which is to say, my continuous blogging about putting more and more effort and thought into living out my highest ideals.

I think one point of the Thinker & Prover Exercize is to handle the mental volleys between believing that your mind can manifest certain things, and believing that such a thing is "unscientific bosh and unscientific delusion," to borrow a phrase from the wonderful Leo Buscaglia-- (Bit of advice, mainly to my friend Michael T. whose copy of Prometheus I'm still borrowing, and who is one of two people I know of who read this blog: After you read about Bernie Madoff and you can feel your soul blacken, read the book "LOVE" by Leo Buscaglia. Also, for dyed-in-the-wool atheists who find my language too New Agey or what-have-you: Buscaglia is for you.)

What was I saying? Oh, so the point of some of these first Exercizes, as I see it, is to sort of put faith into the idea of creating good karma for yourself, but with zero metaphysical hypotheses behind it. Just an amorphous faith in faith. I'll do this throughout my day as homework for BYOGS, then write about it.

My Report From Today's Cosmic Soup:

I have a little four-inch statue of a Buddha meditating that I keep on my windowsill. I'm usually too irredeemably lazy to meditate, but the other day I publicly said that I would, so finally this morning, I did. I sat and relaxed and let my thoughts be clouds floating by.

Then a few hours later, I was at work and went on my lunch break. When I walked out the door, I realized I was walking about twenty paces behind two Buddhist monks. Or, at least, two dudes dressed up as monks. They were wearing bright goldenrod robes and goldenrod caps. Now, I'm sure there are Buddhist monks in Philadelphia, but I've never seen any. Walking literally in the footsteps of a couple of monks for a few blocks today made me feel good about my morning's meditation.

Surely, the nonbeliever is correct to point out that this is a minor coincidence. Simultaneously, though, my choice to interpret it as a little pat on the head from the universe is also a smart choice. It's all how you look at it. Anyway, tomorrow I will set out to meditate for the full fifteen minutes, instead of my attention-deficit substitute, which I'm too embarrassed to say.