Children Left Behind

Perhaps the program I hate the most that ever came out of the cesspool of thought from the Bush administration is this "No Child Left Behind" POS program. We've all heard the same arguments about how the testing is not done correctly and it forces teachers to teach to a test instead of teaching what they thing is worthy. This argument doesn't necessarily hold that much weight with me. The vast majority of people have no idea what is the best way to teach a child on top of no two children being the same. Saying some central office making tests are not accommodating all the teaching styles needed to teach applies to teachers as well. Both groups are being arrogant in thinking they understand what is best.

There is some point here. The federal government should not be involved with anything dealing with morality. It is not the responsibility of the federal to to teach us anything. It is there to protect us from the state politics and to promote equal trade. At the very least the states should be making up the tests.

My personal grievance is this concept that every child is equal and deserves to advance at the same rate as every other child. This is ludicrous. Not every person is born with equal intelligence and to send our children through the first 18 years of their life thinking this and then dump them into college where the professors could care less is a huge fault in parenting. We should be preparing our kids so that they accept their own failures before reaching the point of no return. It is a grievous miscarriage of epic proportions to make our children believe they are special and just as good as every other child when only 10% of children can be considered gifted.

Instead we should be training our kids early on what it means to fail. If we do this when they are 13 then we can be there for them and giving them a helping hand. We can be considerate and understanding so they can learn from their mistake and move to become a better person. Children should be allowed to get Fs and an A should only be granted to those who make more then 90 in the class. Bell curves should only be used if less then 10% of the class made an A. Don't get me wrong. I'm not also abdicating that we force our children to fail, only that the possibility exist.
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Laid Back Men vs. Exciting Men

Here's something that just popped in mind and has to make it here before I forget. I'm having one of the moments where thoughts come in and out of my head like a sieve with a feedback loop.

Women are always saying they want a nice strong guy who can whether any storm and be a beacon of light. That sort of man that can be their knight in shining armor to either help in times of need or simply companionship otherwise. They also say they like excitement and thrills. The classic bad boy who can ride in on his motorcycle and swipe them off on a weekend adventure to some exotic island. But there is a problem with these two.

Both personality types cannot exist in the same person. The laid back person who is stress free is like that because he is capable he no longer gets overexcited in the face of stress or activities. He has learned to control himself and let things go. On the other hand the bad boy is someone goes on adventures because they seek the constant rush. Moving from stressful situation to excitement is what they perceive life to be about.

Don't get me wrong. A guy who is laid back can still go adventures, but he takes them in stride and simply enjoys them. The excitement junkie might hold down a job and family but he will always make sure there is some underlying issue unresolved. Bottom line is the two personality types are completely incompatible and I really wish woemn would realize this.
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When is a Dream Just a Dream?

There will always be side-effects when gaining anything. There is never a good without it's bad nor bad without it's advantage. Everything that presents itself is nothing but another opportunity to be taken advantage of. Without too much detail one thing I just did not expect when I figured out how to control my dreams was that there are two types of dreams. The every night kind where your brain is trying to figure something out and then there's something I guess best described as true dreams.

Normal dreams are a mess. What you have to understand about dreams is that they are exactly like everyone fears the world is really like. Existence only exists in front of you. When you look behind you everything that was in front of you goes away until you either think or look at it again. Sounds fun probably until you have that realization while you are dreaming about someone you care about. If you are not looking at them they do not exist and by looking away you cause them to cease to exist. It took me years to get over this and recover enough to turn my head while dreaming. Well one more thing I figured out was how to jerk myself out of a dream. I don't recommend it because you pretty much lose any recovery gained from sleeping.

If you are reading this you are still not likely to be aware when you are sleeping. It takes something hugely traumatic or dramatic to even begin the process. For those who make it this far the rewards can be huge. When I dream normally I have complete control over what happens and even accomplished some programming work. Of course I had about 15 minutes to get it down before I forgot everything. There's the rub. No matter what you do during these dreams you're going to forget 90% shortly after waking up, even if you try to right it down. Eventually I stop using my dreams to keep work. At this point I pretty much live out whatever fantasies must guys would have. There's a problem with that as well.

The way memory works overlaps with dreaming. Most people go to sleep and their brain puts together a dream to try and help figure out whatever is giving them stress. Let's say that it's something at work, an ex-girlfriend stalking you, a speeding ticket, a concert coming up at, and the $5000 car bill just hit your credit card. Without a directing hand the dream you have can be convoluted but at least when you wake up you have some stress relief caused by some hope of an answer you will never know or make sense of being somewhere in your memory. On the other hand when you have complete control of the dream everything seems so easy:

You go to work after a nice sleep. Once you get there your boss says the problem has been solved because the new employee is taking care of. Out of curiosity you walk around to find out who it is and it turns out to be you ex who is buried by a 3 tons, literally, of paper work that would have been yours. She is going to be so busy that she can no longer stalk you. With nothing to do you call up the police officer and tell her that instead of paying the ticket she is going to sleep with you. So of course she does. While you're having sex the band shows up and gives you a personal show. As they leave they pay $10,000 for the honor of performing and then you pay off the mechanic.

Sounds great right? Not really. When you really do wake up this dream will pop in your head. Because it is even slightly based on reality it will confuse you for a brief second. Now you have these vague thought that causes you to look at all the cubes for your ex and the mechanic to call you later on to tell you that you did not in fact pay him off yet. Reality is going to start falling part around you unless you pull yourself together. It will not take long to figure out that your dreams really need to be completely nuts for your sanity to remain.
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What is Nirvana?

When starting this blog years ago my original intention was to use it as a sort of an internal soapbox to put my own answers. It's pretty obvious from the blog title what sort of answers I'm referring to. Even the design of the site is meant to give the impression of a guide who's design was inspired from an amalgamation of devises to create my ideal of what would be a useful handbook. Well it's time to get back to my roots and start throwing in those experiences that helped shape my life.

Long time ago I was a very sick child. Shoot, I was sickly that I was skinny as a toothpick. Then my parents had a moment of inspiration and had my tonsils, and something else I can never remember the name of, removed. Now instead of getting sick every other month it was about once or twice a year. I was so use to being sick as a child though that I adapted and learned to function normally sick or not. Some time around the age of 11 I got sick once again but this time it was a pretty serious fever. Taking my usual precautions I took an adult dose of NyQuil. I can't even begin to tell you how wonderful that stuff was back in the day. The difference this time was some inspiration from some of the books I had been reading.

That inspiration took the form of trying to meditate instead of sleep. Brilliant! Well if I had any idea at the time how effective my head was at controlling my body I would never have done such a thing. Let me explain the entire situation. I was with a high fever, under the influence of powerful drugs, sleep deprived from the sickness, and pretty good at controlling my body. Having no idea what the hell i was doing I sat in the budda position and began to slow down both my breathing and my heart. Here's the thing, I never actually fell asleep. What did happen could be considered a very deep hallucination but the effect on my life was profound.

Before saying what happened there is one more piece of information. When I was even younger I had a nightmare where I was being chased by some zombie looking monster. Being all five years old and stuff I woke up screaming and ran into my parents bedroom. They told me everything was fine and it was just a nightmare, nothing was real. The next night I had the same dream but that time I stopped running and turned around to discover there was no monster. The whole thing had been in my head but what was most important was I discovered the talent of completely controlling my dreams.

Back to the hallucination. Time passed and without ever falling asleep my mind opened up to a dream. Well, there is no other way for an 11 year to describe something that is occurring in the head when not awake. I found myself bereft in an empty place. This is not to say an empty room but a place devoid of existence. The crazy thing about being nowhere is that there is nothing to fear, just a sensation of there being nothing else and when one has that feeling there is nothing for you to fear. I must have simply accepted the situation, but then decided to change it.

With a thought the world changed. I can't say whether I poured reality into existence or moved myself to outside the void. However it was done I was now in my room sitting in my bed watching TV. It was a new episode of Star Trek that I had wanted to wake up for. Anyways I lost interest because the world refused to stand still. When using any human language there is never the right words to portray an event not commonly felt. By the world not standing still I mean to imply it was rotating, moving around the sun, moving across the galaxy, and out from the center of the universe. Awareness seemed to be a new state of being and this is when I realized I was definitely not awake and could now take control of the situation. (Bare with me as I use words that don't make sense)

The world was rotated until I was positioned outside the window. Standing at window level I absorbed my surroundings and perceived the presence of all the animals. There was a slight hum that may have been the insects but the number of insects around you at any given moment is more then a person can comprehend so I didn't. There were chipmunks and squirrels running around trying to stay away from my cat. The birds were chirping and there was a ball of blinding light just searing my away. The sun felt like an inferno from hell ready to incinerate me. Considering it was a dream I brought forth clouds. Well that's not fair. I lowered the pressure around me which caused clouds to fall into the sky above me, giving me enough shade to see what I had been missing.

The plants were alive and teeming with activity. Even better was the wind and vapor in the air. Here was my first inclination of the intrusion of reality. When you dream you do not experience either smell or touch. They are perceived but don't actually occur. In this dream all five senses were present and this realization pushed upon me something different. I hate to say sixth sense as that implies something that can be experienced where as here there was sensation of awareness. I became aware of a dis-pattern to the world that linked everything together. It could be called nature or even the force but whatever I noticed it allowed me to trace events in a sort of butterfly manner.

My cat chased a squirrel up a tree which made it safely to a branch causing it to shake. That shook loose a piece of bark that flowed with the wind to higher branch and hit a leaf just right causing it to be knocked off. That leaf then was caught up in the same wind upwards and out until it swished behind a tree where it jumped off the wind and floated steadily down. Right before touching ever so slightly on the grass a bolt of lightning seared through and connected up through the tree where it met with a downward bolt. The connecting point at the top of the try split it open and rebounded with a crash the threw me off the bed and rattled the front of my house.

Slowing down my rapidly going out of control heart was the last thing I had mind. I was still stunned by the appearance of an identical storm to the one in my dream. The news had said rain was unlikely. It would take me days to calm down and years more to understand and control the events that would spawn from this one intersection in time. Leaving those for another day there is still the question of what exactly happened. Don't get all in a huf and tell me that was not Nirvana. Unless you experience Nirvana yourself you have no ability to dictate to others.

In some ways you would be right though. The dream was not Nirvana and no dream or meditation can ever bring you to Nirvana, EVER. Those who think this are suffering delusions from the human condition. One can never achieve peace and understanding by simply undergoing an out of body experience. It is not something reached by simply following instructions or being the perfect person. Nirvana is a state reached through random thoughts occurring as a result of a series of completed unrelated events triggering the proper enlightened understanding of yourself. This dream was merely my culmination but from this my entire life took shape.

Once you reach Nirvana you are no different then the moment before. Stop thinking of it as an end goal for your life. Once I recovered from that moment I became aware of the world around me as if someone was reading a description of it instead of being there. People, places, things, animals, plants, nature, etc. were all more vivid and connected in a way that had always been there but was finally able to perceive. Therefore the best way to explain Nirvana is to tell you that it is a new perception of the world you area already aware of.
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