Busy, busy past month . . . and haven't wanted to write much since Kayla crossed over. Our entire family, dogs included, have been in mourning and a bit out of sync. But, on January 23rd, I began a very personal journey of further developing my spirituality and beliefs. Not a fan of religious dogma, I'm studying under two gifted and wise teachers, and I'm on this journey with a group of 25 others. For the next nine months, we're going to engage in some butt-kicking, gut-wrenching introspective work. My first assignment was to create a "vision board". A vision board, in and of itself, is a simple concept: take a poster board, glue onto it pictures or words that represent what you want out of life, and consistently view it so that you begin to manifest those things in your life. There is a scientfic principal behind it --at the base of the human brain stem, in between the medulla oblongata and the mesencephalon, there is a small finger-sized control center called the reticular activating system (RAS) that sorts and evaluates the huge amount of incoming information your brain receives. Your RAS filters that massive amount of incoming data and also acts as receiver for information that is tagged as "important". According to one university researcher, your RAS can’t distinguish what is a real event and one you contrive, and, therefore, you can exploit this weakness to program it to seek out things in our environment that resonate with our personal goals, i.e., through the use of a vision board. For me, however, that science stuff just sucks all the fun and mystery out of it --- I prefer to just refer to it as the "law of attraction" that has received so much media attention over the past several years with the popularity of "The Secret". Anyway, I made my vision board, pasting onto it the things I desire most in my life --- my relationships, city I want to live in, places I want to travel to, wealth, healthy living, music, words that I want to frame my life, yada yada yada. I'm not sure, though, that I might not revise it. For example, I put on it a picture of a black 7 series, BMW (I once was given one for a weekend to enjoy -- ooh la la, what a ride), but, after reflection, I really don't want a $100,000 car ---- it, in no way, resonates with who I am. So, I think my "vision" might need revisions, but I've made a great start. I even put my board into the transparency cover on the front of my class notebook so that I see it every day and am, hopefully, manipulating my RAS to make this stuff my reality. Time will tell . . .
