Awareness

The awareness of our surroundings, what we have learned to accept, how we view what is generally a daily perception can drive our subconscious mind into complacency.

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Driving Out Complacency


Now I know no one wants to acknowledge they have become complacent in anything. I for one can struggle with this. Everyday produces situations that if they go unrecognized we can be taking another step toward complacency involving one thing or another. As humans we can become so ingrained in our thoughts and beliefs that we miss things going on around us. We start believing we have the answer before we know the question. We don’t stop long enough to realize that there is generally always two sides to a story if not more. We jump to conclusions without acknowledging what is right in front of us. We allow our education system to educate us and we never slow down long enough to educate ourselves. We hear what we are told but never question its validity.

Complacency could be something simple such as our eating habits or possibly exercise or lack thereof. Maybe it is in our lack of desire to learn new things, explore what others find interesting, listening to other explanations and not just live in our own world. Or our desire to dig deeper into what we believe and put our faith in enabling ourselves to reinforce our convictions or alter them. Ridding ourselves of complacency does not mean doing what everyone else does. It just means being aware of why someone does something and why they believe one way or the other. It is being open to discussing both view-point and not just having a one-sided conversation or walking away from it completely.

Acknowledging complacency is critical to our physical and mental health. It can be the pill the doctor ordered. The simple task of admitting to ourselves that it exist gives each of us a tool which will allow our lives to flourish in so many ways. Stagnation in our thinking, our health, our conversation, our faith, our work, and almost every area of our lives can be exterminated.

Join me on my journey to continue stomping out complacency from my life by doing the same in yours. Make a personal pledge to always be open-minded enough to explore different avenues as they present themselves. To be open to other opinions and to discuss them sharing your beliefs and understandings. Have a want to grow your knowledge, and a wish to life healthy. I truly believe that if we would live healthier our spirit would be healthier. If we expand our knowledge our conversations become healthy allowing two-sided discussions and not just someone accepting what someone tells them. We are born with a body and a mind and we need to feed both of them with good food.

If you have an area of complacency in your life please share it here with a comment or with a friend. We all have some level of complacency we need to deal with. One of the biggest for me was believing everything I was taught in school. Then I was supposed to believe everything I was taught in church. Each contradicted the other. It was only after I decided to challenge myself on these topics that I started ridding myself of confusion and my life became stable. In this case I concluded that one belief or the other had to be correct. Either we were created or we evolved. This is truly a live and death altering question. I can tell you that I believe we were created and for really good reasons. I have tried to explain this in the book “Deceptive Influences” if you are interested in the rest of my story.

Now as we continue this day moving to the next I wish you good travels down the road of eliminating complacency from life.

 

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What a Wonderful World We Could Live In


What would we do if this world we live in was perfect? 

How would our lives be altered from what it is today?

If one was to let their imagination wonder and just flow around life in a perfect world, I could believe that smiles would come on our faces, grins would happen where frowns once existed, stomachs would gurgle with delight as we feed it with perfect foods, people would be laughing instead of crying, everyone would bend to help someone up instead of walking on by, love of and by everyone would be the only way. No more hate, no more crime, no need for jails, no need for court systems, just peace everywhere. Money would not be required as we all live to help each other. Harmony, just plain sweet harmony! No more searching for the meaning of life, where we came from and why we are here. Evolution of the world including man would be meaningless as we just absorb the beauty around us.

Ok – I just woke up from my dream. However, I now wonder if God created each of us and everything around us to live just like my dream, then what went wrong? Did He plan for people to hate people, did He plan for different classes of people or were we all created equal. Why would God the creator of all of everything (if you believe in creationism) design something that has such flaw’s. Or was it a flaw? If we would have been created to live in this world never to have any issue with another, never to be disturbed about anything, just living each day, day in and day out in a some sort of trance,  we would be living without the power to think and to experience everything He created. So He gave us the ability to see, touch, smell, hear and taste things. For this to work He needed to give us a brain that could comprehend each of these things. With a brain that can comprehend we then have the ability to want. With a brain that can want we form opinions. With opinions we take up positions. It is these positions that get this world in trouble.

Of course if you are an evolutionist none of this really matters anyway. We are just here by chance and via the process of change because it is needed because of something that requires it to change,  we should not have any ill-feelings about this world we live in just because we embrace change in our philosophy of life. Only the best survive.

However, if God created everything and he created man in His image, then he must have known we can screw things up! He must have a mind to think with or He could have never created anything. So he gave man only two simple rules. Love Me with all your heart and love your neighbor and of course don’t eat that apple. Pretty simple rules with no underling small print needing a king or some supreme court to rule on. Just follow those two simple rules. Now if we look at the idea of loving God, it’s not hard to comprehend that if we really believe or maybe in the case of Adam and Eve, knew he created everything, it would be pretty easy to love him just by looking around and seeing all the beauty around us. And let’s not forget that had He not created man we would not be here and able to love and appreciate everything around us.

So was it God who screwed up this world, causing conflicts between men, woman, ethnic groups, religious groups, or countries, or was it man just because he has the ability to think, a mind to manage his thoughts, and drive his desires?

“Without God then we are just something in time that really in the end means nothing. But with God we are somebody!”

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God’s Not Dead – part 2


I was doing some research and quickly found the following statements. As I read the article I became even more aware of the efforts to explain what happened that proves what or who we are – while not really explaining much of anything. The efforts to cloud an issue while working hard to clarify and substantiate current theories is somewhat mind-boggling. If you read what is written closely you will see that the efforts put forth in the end completely support the requirement, the staging and the changes that had to take place that allowed man of old to live such a long life (up to and over 900 years). These changes in sea level and how the atmosphere changed hold such a key to who we are. Changes like these disrupt the current scientific dating methods more specifically carbon dating. As you read the report keep in mind that if the Cambrian explosion happened and it was responsible for starting life forms to evolve, and that it took place 530 million years ago, then we should not find things of human origin or things of later era’s located in this formation of the earth. However, we do find these things. Is it even possible that life of anything could have existed and then survived this explosion. Is it possible for this type explosion to happen and still keep our earth in its place in the atmosphere allowing life that existed to continue and expand into what we see today? If it took an explosion to really kick-start life as we know it, then how could it possibly take 20 million years. It would not be an explosion! It would have been a process and this is what science wants us to believe happened. So was it a process or an explosion?

LiveScience
By By Tia Ghose, Staff Writer
September 19, 2013 2:47 PM

Evolutionary ‘Big Bang’ Was Triggered by Multiple Events

The Cambrian explosion, the evolutionary “big bang” that led to the emergence of a trove of complex life forms, was caused by multiple events, researchers argue.

Genetic changes allowing for complex body plans combined with rising sea levels and an influx of chemicals into the ocean probably created the unique conditions needed to set off the Cambrian explosion, researchers argue in a perspectives paper published today (Sept. 19) in the journal Science.

“There was this cascade of events,” said study co-author Paul Smith, a paleobiologist at the University of Oxford’s Museum of Natural History. “You can see how one process might feed into one another and possibly amplify it as it feeds back.”

Evolutionary big bang

About 530 million years ago during the Cambrian Period, the diversity of life on Earth exploded. The first sea-faring predators and prey emerged, animals developed strange and diverse body plans and evolved hard exoskeletons. A recent study revealed that life evolved during the Cambrian Period at a rate about five times faster than today. [Cambrian Creatures: Images of Primitive Sea Life]

Scientists have proposed everything from genetic changes to a starburst in the Milky Way to explain the explosion in diversity.

“There are well over 30 hypotheses out there for the Cambrian explosion,” Smith told LiveScience.

Smith and his colleagues looked through all the existing research to see what could explain the evolution of complexity from relatively simple life forms that existed prior to the Cambrian explosion.

“Prior to this, a typical ecosystem would have been a microbial mat with a few things sitting on top,” Smith said. (Microbial are single cell living organisms. Where did they come from?)

At that time, animals couldn’t eat large particles of food, and there were no food webs with predators chasing prey. (if life forms started based on the theory that the big bang mixed just the right amount of chemicals and etc. together to start life, then life didn’t exist prior to the big bang. If it did exist then the big bang did not start life. At the time of the big bang no animals existed big or small. So how did it start?)

Multiple factors

The researchers found genetic changes were needed to get the ball rolling toward an explosion of life. By estimating mutation rates, biologists have concluded the genes that code for complex, easily adaptable, bilateral body plans — a necessary precursor for diverse life forms — likely evolved 150 million years prior to the Cambrian Period. (Some evidence suggests this evolution may have occurred closer in time to the Cambrian explosion.)

But genetic changes alone couldn’t explain the explosion in diversity.

The rise of sea levels and the flooding of flat, shallow areas of the continents may have served as triggering events. The flooded areas would have provided vastly more habitat for organisms, and the contact between the eroded rock surface and the seawater would have infused minerals, such as calcium and strontium, into the oceans.

Those minerals are toxic to cells, so animals would’ve needed a way to excrete them.

The animals then would have evolved the ability to incorporate those minerals into their exoskeletons, enabling much more complicated body plans, predation and more modern food webs.

The idea that many factors led to the Cambrian explosion is pretty widespread, said Robert Gaines, a geologist at Pomona College in California, who was not involved in the study.

“I think there are very few people who wouldn’t wholeheartedly agree with that,” Gaines told LiveScience.

Though the Cambrian explosion is described as a big bang, it was a rather drawn-out affair occurring over 20 million years, Michael Lee, a researcher at the South Australian Museum at the University of Adelaide, who was not involved in the study, wrote in an email.

“One would expect that a range of complex ecological and abiotic drivers might have acted at different times throughout the period,” Lee said.

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What happened to all the people?


A Think Tank question:

Have you ever had a time when you were looking at something to purchase and when comparing the difference in cost of new vs. used and having checked out the available statics, you determine that new is the best way to go? However, down the road what you purchased new no longer worked while your friend with the used one was still using it and it was working just like yours did when it was new? The world of statistics can be fascinating and generally can add credibility to most any thing if they exist, if true information is utilized with no hidden motivation in their compilation. Summing this up we really need just the true facts to draw a solid conclusion.

Looking into our world population and the current numbers that everyone agrees exists today and moving backward based on the proven and statically agreed to population growth formula, we find that when we reach all the way back to the first two people – a man and a woman living on earth – it would be around 4500 years ago. I find this quite incredible since we are continually educated that this earth is many millions and billions of years old. That we are told that it takes millions of years for something to evolve into something else. That a man and a woman would have evolved just in time – at the same time – just to start the population of our earth is quite mind-boggling.

What is wrong? Who is wrong? Is anything wrong? Think about it!

 

 

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The Migration Season


Northern Michigan at it Best!

Each year as fall and winter approach, the animals and birds start their journey to their winter homes. Some of us will do the same thing, moving to a warmer climate to avoid those cold winters.

It’s interesting how this approach to life also impedes our daily thoughts. How we tend to migrate to what makes us comfortable. Some of us like to curl up on a sofa or favorite chair and read a book or watch one of our favorite movies. Some will throw on running shoes and hit the trails. One might dispute that they are not the same. Some people I know that get such great joy out of running would argue they are. The big difference is that for the runner you must first work at it until your body starts looking for that rush you get. It becomes our mental state of mind. One might have a glass of a favorite wine, lite the fire in the fireplace and sit back letting our mind and body slide into deep relaxation. We have trained our brains in a way that fits our desires, what makes us comfortable, and what we feel gives our life stability, and in many ways purpose.

Running, walking, reading, participating in a sport ( I personally enjoy golfing), or just meditating is great. We should desire some level of this in our lives. It’s also important to realize that becoming content with our daily lives, we have allowed some level of complacency to settle in.

As a runner, we enjoy that rush we get, but as our body ages, we need to recognize that maybe it is time to take brisk walks instead. As a reader, we need to explore new authors gaining new perspectives. Maybe it is examining the other side of a topic that we feel strongly against. We should not allow complacency to inhibit our ability to look outside the box. We should look to reinforce our current beliefs or possibly alter our position just a little.

Opening one’s mind to things outside our comfort zone is difficult. Our subconscious mind drive our feelings. Many times we dismiss thing around us just because we didn’t see them or we dismissed the thought before we took the time to think about it. We didn’t agree or thought it was a waste of time.

It truly takes a conscious effort to eliminate complacency from our lives.

I once asked myself the question: What is this life all about anyway?

Allowing myself the freedom to explore this thought, raised a key question. Did I evolve from something or was I created by someone? Logic would say of course I was created by my mom and dad. But what came first? The chicken or the egg? How did this all start?

Watching the discovery channel, I’m told that it all started millions of years ago. That my great, great————, great grand father was really just a single cell that randomly happened.  If this is the case than I guess that we are only on this earth for what we call our life time. Once this is over we just decay away too nothing but a memory in someone’s mind.

But how could this cell be randomly started with the built-in DNA requirement to make me into a human complete with brain and mind to think with? Is it then possible that I was created? If so, then I do have a real purpose. Maybe there is more to this life and possibly even death.

Exploring these questions is something each of us should attempt to do. We should not just accept what we are told on TV, in our museums, in our schools, and even in our places of worship. We need to decide for ourselves what is true and to do this we have to overcome the complacency of our mind. Directing our lives and not allowing someone else to control our thoughts and beliefs can be difficult. The satisfaction of expanding our knowledge, allowing ourselves to stand firmly on our beliefs, never hiding from a discussion, and always being able to have open dialog with those who have a belief different than ours, is the key to a full and robust life.

So until tomorrow when the sun comes up again, I will continue my quest. Please feel free to join me on my adventure and chime in anytime. Your thoughts and ideas are welcome.

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