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The Rules: 1. What you know and what you believe are different things. 2. Everyone always tells the truth, even when they are lying. What a person chooses to say or is driven to say reveals the makeup of their being and is always visible for those who can see it and are not clouded by their own story. 3. Power is not a thing to be kept or collected. Power passes through us. We must make ourselves conduits for the greater power and we must use the power that passes through us to make others more powerful. If you aren’t willing to lose power, you are unworthy of power. If you make yourself into a perfect conduit and channel power appropriately when it cycles to you, it will come to you again, because it will recognize your conductive value and begin to seek you out. 4. We do not exist. In the beginning, God exploded himself into everything that is so that he could know himself. We are all parts of God and our mission is to experience our individual lives and beings, and then when all is said and done return back to the whole with our experience. We are the existence of God and we are God experiencing himself. 5. Learn or Get Taught: you will understand in the end, you have to choose whether to be open to the information and truth (learn) or to have the information and truth delivered to you (get taught) because you are too invested in your own constructed narrative and validating and safeguarding your own illusion of separation from God and others. This form of coming to the truth is the most painful, but it still gets you there. We do not exist. 6. We are all part of the same story. Within each of our own stories the larger story is told, and of course, you can find each of our stories in the larger story. 7. Seek to be kind above all else. 8. What one generation learns the next takes on faith. Faith can’t continue forever without being met by skepticism. The skepticism of that third generation will either lead to the discovery of whatever error was made by the first generation and create space for modification or dismantling, or it will reinforce the truth of the findings of that first generation and the bolster the faith of the second. 9. Surrender to Joy 10. Every relationship creates a chemical reaction that changes both participants and makes them something new. Every interaction with another being creates a new thing and leaves an impression on each participant. 11. Every word you speak is a kind of prayer. An invocation.

The Beauty of Wear & Tear

I feel a kind of affection for any piece of clothing I absolutely wore the shit out of. This has been a great pair of corduroys. I’ve probably been wearing these pants weekly for the last 15 years.