It will be interesting to see what future generations make of Occupy Wall Street. In the meantime, 89.3 KPCC is asking: What do you make of Occupy LA? Check it out.
While most of us can’t participate and don’t feel heard, at least this is one way of weighing in. And isn’t it what this is all about, reclaiming our voices?
http://www.scpr.org/network/questions/occupyla/
You can also check the Los Angeles event last night as the LAOWS was forced out. People are mad.
For the past two decades, the computer industry and how it is turning the Internet has been asking you: “Are you sure, that you’re sure that you want to do that?”
The gist is how sure am I from deleting a file? Why, I clicked on the button, didn’t I? Don’t understand what I mean? Have you tried signing up for a an Internet service lately? Worse yet, have you lost a password and had to retrieve it? Then you know what I mean by the countless mouse clicking and: “Are you sure that you’re sure you want to do that?” treatment.
Apple iTunes, Leading The Way. I’m using less and less iTunes since a while back I realized I inadvertently created 3 different accounts. I had money on all and things got complicated when a friend gave me her iPhone. iTunes got confused. It asked for password and somehow, I lost all but one account, including the money in it. I found out Apple has different structures, iTunes, Apple and Mobile Me. I dropped the last two and I hear iCloud will address these issues.
Social Media Sign Up Nightmare. A while back, my business partner and I started a website which will be revealed in due time. We tried signing up on Facebook, Google +, LinkedIn, Twitter and MySpace. Facebook wouldn’t allow fictitious names, nor does LinkedIn. I started a new Gmail account to bypass these non-sense but Google didn’t allow our newly registered domain generic info@ email address. In the end, MySpace and Twitter were the easiest. Should it really be that difficult to sign up for a free service? Or the better question is, should I have to pay for the idiotic spammer and physhers out there making it hard for us to use our Internet?
Social media and the Internet should be open and easy to use. The problem, as usual is that those who abuse it make it tough on us. In the end, it’s a pretty day outside, I’ll go out and enjoy it 
Dear friends,
I’m happy again to invite you to another top leader summit, the Global Oneness Day on Monday October 24th!
It’s a one-day virtual telesummit featuring 40 inspiring thought leaders such as Ambassador Chowdhury, Neale Donald Walsch, Gangaji, Kenny Loggins, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Lynne McTaggart and many more for free.
You can gain access to these leaders, October 24th, or by recording, and be part of groundbreaking sessions that offer profound insights for creating your life and our world based on the principles of oneness.
You can register for free 
here.
What Is Global Oneness Day? Global Oneness Day is an opportunity to connect deeply with a global community of changemakers and heart-centered people. You’ll learn practical steps and actions you can take that will benefit your life and help create a culture of Oneness.
Join me and let’s celebrate our oneness together!
Nick
Picture, Nick Zart
The global outreach Occupy Wall Street has is impressive and at the same time scary.
The gist is when too much is too much, people will take to the street. However taking to the streets because you and I are fed up with the system leads to nothing constructive without a vision. A peaceful demonstration with a clear vision of what people want and will not tolerate is what makes a successful transition form one system to another, not just a revolution.
Revolution Without A Vision. A revolution without a clear vision fails pray to manipulation and eventually political recuperation. Occupy Wall Street started as an ad hoc movement that would never deign talking to the media. A few weeks later Unions joined the movement and now politics are getting entangled. Democrats are salivating at the idea of turning this to their favor, Republicans are offering resistance asking for people to work more instead of complaining.
Awareness In Action And Movement. In a society that leaves close to no time to think, understand our lives and stresses us into making more money in order to meet the ever increasing onslaught of bills and taxes, it is important to stop and take the time to reflect. As with anything we do in life, taking action without thinking things through, understanding our action and mostly having a vision is a sure way to falter. It’s the quickest way to make sure a special interest will either derail it or use it to its advantage.
In the meantime, those of you who wish to elucidate, please contact me.
Picture: Nick Zart
I was stomped when asked what does it mean to be a man in today’s society.
The gist is there is no manual. It surely can’t be the stereotype weight lifter at the gym, nor the attitude guy driving his car hand on the other side of the steering wheel. Being a man today is much dynamic, with fuller depth and surely much deeper than meets the eye. It has to be that inner most wisdome we have neglected over the decades.
What It Means To Be A Man Today. A man today should be many things, including something most aren’t used to, deep, in touch with their inner wisdom and feelings. Ancient societies provided young men rites of passage, today we have no such things but to sit down and think it through.
so What Is A Man, Then? A man who acknowledges when wrong, one who knows with quiet confidence when right, one who uses wisdom and compassion wisely. Most of these attributes I realized were found in Dzogchen, the purest esoteric form of Tibetan Buddhism… of all place.
Here is a passage I was reading this morning on 
In other word, shouldn’t a “man” be one who accepts who he is without judgement, looks at what is front of him without preconceived notions, accepting his moods and feelings as that present moment, not more, and holding that space sacred so that what is to come happens untainted from expectations? I’m going off on a limb here but I felt a strange sense of finding a clue in an ancient esoteric tradition about what it means to be a man. Something worth while exploring for all those young guys without guidance. I should know…
I wake up, blink my eyes a few times as I try to recall where am I, who am I. You see, my dreams are as vivid as what we call reality.
The gist is moving through life, we need a certain amount of self image if we are to interface and communicate with others. The problem is that self image might not be accurate, nor are others, which can explain a lot of the current problems we run into.
Self Image As A Starting Block. We need to start somewhere in the road to self discovery, the trick is to not take it at face value, nor take our embellished self image seriously. We are born naked and often exit the same way, with ourselves.
While we it is equally possible to say that all is illusion, therefore nothing is real, we can always remind ourselves of this proven fact, an illusion hurting another still hurts. The trick is maintaining that careful balance of putting one foot forward into the unknown, with a hefty amount of unknown and self illusion. After all, we must start somewhere.
In many ways, we are like computers computing for an impossible answer with little to false data. Ours is a strange quest and yet the answers as so simple once we fear not what lies within us.
Looking at how the latest trend to (over-)value outward displays of passion in our society, there are interesting lessons we can learn.
The gist is that passion is a great motivator… IF used wisely. Without passion, we probably wouldn’t be here and there would be very little fun on Earth. But passion, when taken to extreme and as we can sometime witness, can be used for the wrong reasons and push hidden agendas. So how do we temper our exuberance?
Sure passion is important, but it needs to be checked and double checked with a modicum of common sense. This trend into the outward display of passion is obviously well manipulated by marketers into advertising that extol the values of oozing passion with an over-flow of emotions. Hollywood also uses copious cases of passion-over-brain by expounding the virtues of passionate heroes, sometimes well beyond the scope of common sense.
Maybe I’m feeling a little raw after watching again Star Trek’s Enterprise and seeing the overly, and most of the time over the top emotional Scott Bakula as the first Captain of the Enterprise crew. I would hope our first inter-stellar Captain to be a little more logical, calm and collected, not subject to violent emotions. After all, I don’t recall any of the Apollo crew members displaying much emotions. Bizarre reactions, yes, but not overly emotional.
Oh Spock, where are you?
We ave been almost completely chemical free in the house for a few years now. The last problem is convincing our cleaning lady to sparingly use those organic concentrates in little amounts.
The gist is once you do the math and research, white vinegar and baking soda clean as well as chemical, with the added plus that it doesn’t leave chemicals behind not flushes it down the drain to mother nature. After a few years of using these natural products, our house is still clean, none of our friends have ever reported being sick from coming over and we don’t subsidize meg-chemical corporations.
The Cleaning Lady’s Learning Curve. Unfortunately, our cleaning lady, however well meaning is well set in her ways of copious use of chemicals. We tried using concentrates from organic chemical free products, but her heavy hand makes it expensive and we are replacing one chemical for another concentrate, however purer it is.
Funny thing is, she has a daughter and should want her to live in a purer world then the one she is leaving behind. It’s funny in the end that the hardest part of living a purer life is training the cleaning people to use healthy products instead of using the chemical industry’s infernal death spiral. The more chemical we use, the more profits for them, the more pollution for Earth and the the more our health degenerates.
It’s high time we break our chemical dependance from companies that massacre the Earth and drain our health down with formidable financial consequences. How hard should it be to use natural products that clean as well, disinfect and clean, while not submitting your body to poisons?
Watching the latest rounds of not too surprising fights between the political right and left, one can’t be left wondering why.
The gist is all of us get along, no matter how different we are and think, we somehow get along, as neighbors, sometimes friends and at the very least, people who share a community. So how come we still support those who divide us and make a living from it? Don’t we all share the unalienable desire for freedom, growth and prosperity? Yet, how come we vote one against the other and worse yet, for a party over another that manages nothing less than put down the other party? Parties that are so bloated and disconnected from reality whose philosophy is lip service and whose actions are so similar are so similar in the end. When the right passes left funding and the left passes right laws, where is the logic? Are we still in middle school?
Watching the debate between the current administration and it opposition, it’s hard to imagine these people as “leader”, in any stretch of the imagination. If this is what they have to offer best, then we need to usher them out and not wait for them to create crisis in order to resolve them and be hailed as saviors. The political manipulations are so heavy and glaring, it’s sad to see people still voting for them.
I know people who still vote left or right, but I wonder, how much longer till they also realize this current crop of so called politicians finally let them down? How much longer will these voters drag the rest of us down this ideological impasse when most of us long for a more unified way of living?
When we talk of government budget cuts, not effecting the poor and letting the rich alone, yet 75% of our taxes goes into military might to protects us from… other human beings… how long will it be till everyone realizes that the last few decades of political shenanigans have left us crippled, divided, broke and certainly has never, ever worked. If these 75% was spend differently, we wouldn’t have poor people dragging us down, they could be educated and we would have been on Mars by now. But then again, politicians wouldn’t have a job and they would rather drag us down then let this happen.
The current political games are a chicken game that could finally leave us wrecked, while China and other nations have already woken up and surpassing us. It’s a luxury we just don’t have to wade in meaningless political debates that only keep politicians in their place and assures them a flush paycheck while the rest of the country sweats it out. But as long as we vote for them…
So how long will it take to say no to them, left and right?
Picture, Nick Zart
Gasp… Horror! A shopping mall experience on a Saturday afternoon getting back from India.
The gist is sometimes it sounds as if we live in isolation in the middle of a crowded society. This incredible brain twister can be felt any tie we witness people rushing to be first in line, rummage through sales, drivers who have to be the first at a traffic light and then drive slowly. Why? Most of us live in seclusion, disconnected form others and share little sense of being part of a community. So, here is my experience at a shopping mall.
We just got back from India where your sense of what is important seriously challenges your priorities. We went off the beaten path and witnessed life in secondary cities. What we saw were people living in conditions we would deplore back home, where their main worry was if they would have food on their plate tomorrow. Yet, somehow, these people were incredibly warm, gentle, inviting, sincere, open to us with a small we rarely witnessed back in the West. Now fast forward back in the west…
We went to Nordstrom the following Saturday feeling we needed some new clothes. What we witnessed was so disturbing after coming from an environment so starch and harsh with reality. We saw people elbowing each other in order to get to the best deals of the day. We saw people who didn’t seem to have much spatial awareness, even less as to others around them. It felt their endeavor to be the first one to get that deal trumped any other notions of life. It was shocking, to say the least.
It’s not to diss our society. We have everything we need to thrive and be happy, we are not educated to look within for happiness. Their society, on the hand has little in terms of shared material wealth but have boat loads in terms of inner values and spiritual upbringing. Would it be great finally using all that we have at our disposal? Don’t we owe it to our parents who built our so-called modern and developed societies? One of the best ways is to partner with a coach in order to dig deep within and have a better vantage view.