Let’s see. I’ve got my iPod all setup with a calendar for practice of consciousness. With the supposed movement away from the mercury retrograde cycle, my energy levels have started to come back, though I am unsure if that was the cause.
Will I read this 6 months from now and realize I failed and got caught by the twist of the ol’ Octave?
The italicized text below is from the online article at http://www.diarmani.com/Articles/Armani/Alternate%20Endings.htmÂ
I find it interesting because as I get to know myself better and work on my problems, I wasn’t sure that if in the face of danger would I be one of the 7 mentioned in the article below, or in the group that walked out. In some respects, I have a similar time with what’s left of my marriage. Who are we really – I suppose we only know when put to the test.
Montreal Massacre: Alternate Endings
By Christopher di Armani
Gamil Gharbi single-handledly changed the face of Canadian gun politics. He became the embodiment of everything that man-hating feminists despise. In their horror and fear they lashed out at every Canadian male, and continue to do so today.
Someone said at the time, “The blood of these fourteen women are on the hands of every manâ€. Complete and utter garbage, but the national media lapped it up.
But what was the real problem in Montreal that fateful December day? Was it a lack of “gun control� Not according to the Montreal Coroner Teresa Z. Sourour. She said quite clearly the exact opposite, not that anyone in government or the media noticed.
“The issue of firearms control has intentionally not been addressed. With the unlimited ammunition and time that Marc Lépine (Gamil Gharbi) had available to him, he would probably have been able to achieve similar results even with a conventional hunting weapon, which itself is readily accessible.â€
Indeed it wasn’t until 2004, a full fifteen years after the event, that we were finally able to get the government to translate her report into English. (see diArmani.com for Ms. Sourour’s full report. [doc format])
Was it the failure of mental health officials? I doubt it. We did not have “thought police†in 1989 (and thankfully do not today either), and until this event, Mr. Gharbi apparently didn’t exhibit much in the way of abnormal psychology.
Was it the failure of police responding to the scene? Ms. Sourour said yes. I disagree. Sure, they formed a perimeter and sat outside waiting until Gharbi offed himself, but that is not the root cause of the high death toll.
The failure that day was with our manhood. Or more to the point, our lack of one. For thirty years or more, men had been “trained†to be obedient, to do what they’re told, to be more “feminineâ€, less “manlyâ€.
So they did exactly what the lunatic with the gun said. They abandoned their sisters to a sure and horrific death.
They left the room.
I pray that the faces of those fourteen dead women haunt every single male who did as Gharbi ordered, every single night for the remainder of their spineless lives. They were there when it counted. They could have saved the lives of their fellow students and they chose not to. Shame on them all. They failed the woman, they failed themselves, and they failed Canada.
Let’s imagine, for a moment, two alternative endings to Montreal on December 6, 1989.
Let’s imagine that a single one of those men had the courage to say “No!â€
Imagine if he had gathered his thoughts and his courage, and simply stormed Gharbi. Sure, he might have been shot, even killed. But his actions would have showed clear leadership, and surely one or two other men would have joined the battle. Gharbi would have been taken down in the very first classroom, with perhaps three or four wounded or dead.
That’s a far cry from 14 dead & 29 wounded.
But wait! you say, That’s never going to happen! Who in their right mind is going to confront an armed madman in a school shooting?
Nobody!
Are you sure?
Because there are 7 young men at the Thurston High School in Oregon who are living proof you are wrong.
Yes, the young man leading the counter-attack, Jacob Ryker, was shot multiple times. He didn’t let that stop him. He continued on until the man with the gun was disarmed, and he lived to tell about it. Not only that, he was awarded the highest honour in the Boy Scouts of America for his bravery and leadership. (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/1998/08/11/national/main8610.shtml)
Now let’s look at another scenario, one that seems to disturb so many Canadians today.
Imagine our laws were different.
Imagine that, instead of doing their best to disarm every Canadian, our government believed in our inherent right to defend ourselves. Imagine they had the common sense and the decency to promote lawful concealed carry for any law-abiding citizen that can meet the same proficiency with firearms and use of force training as our police officers.
It’s not that difficult a threshold.
Had there been a single law-abiding citizen with a concealed handgun in Montreal’s l’Ecole Polytechnique that fateful day in 1989, the outcome would have been different. It would have been swift and effective.
Gharbi pulls his rifle out of his duffel bag and points it at someone. He might even get a shot or two off. Then some man or woman with the foresight (and the training) to carry would have stopped him dead.
We wouldn’t be holding candle-light vigils for fourteen dead women, believing that if we just blame enough men for the tragedy, it won’t happen again. The cold, brutal reality is so completely the opposite.
Look at every school shooting in North America and what do they all have in common? “Gun-Free Zonesâ€. Every school has, as its published policy, no legal firearms permitted.
It didn’t help in Columbine. It didn’t help in Tabor. It didn’t help in Virginia Tech. It didn’t help in Dawson College. And it didn’t help in l’Ecole Polytechnique in 1989. Nor will it help the next time some unbalanced individual with a gun goes on a shooting rampage in the next “gun-free zoneâ€.
The time has come to stop pretending we can light a candle to stop the violence. The time has come to focus on solutions that work.
Guaranteeing the death of our young people is not something we should be proud of, yet that is what we do every time we legislate another “gun-free zoneâ€.
The only people who obey the rules are the law-abiding. People like you and me.
We do not walk into a school or a mall and start shooting people.
Yet we are the very people the state demands be defenseless in the face of evil.
It’s time that changed. It’s time our politicians paid attention to us and the real solution we offer.
It’s time concealed carry was made accessible again.
Yes, I said again.
It wasn’t so long ago that concealed carry was a realistic option in Canada, and obtaining a concealed carry permit wasn’t a big deal.
It’s already legal. The law is on the books. Our bureaucrats simply deny every application that doesn’t meet their “criteriaâ€. (read every application)
Let’s tell our elected politicians we want them to take control of the unelected bureaucracy and make concealed carry accessible to ordinary Canadian Citizens.
Again.
—
Christopher di Armani is a freelance writer and filmmaker who resides in Lytton, BC, Canada, with his wife Lynda and their two dogs, Koda and Tuco.
Christopher can be contacted at christopher(at)diArmani.com or http://www.diArmani.com.
In a bit of history I learned about life in the 1500s it was said that back then:
“Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof. Hence the saying It’s raining cats and dogs.”
Well, it is raining a different kind of Dogs and Cats in China. I recently read that in China/Korea people torture dogs/cats before they are killed because they believe it gives a better flavor. I’m shocked beyond belief by this statement, though I do not know whether it is true.
I also find the topic of this url below shocking, yet parts of me do not find the killing of cows shocking:
Quoting the above article:
“China’s dogs & cats are boiled, stabbed, drowned, bludgeoned, strangled, poisoned, hanged, and electrocuted…experiencing unbearable pain as their legs are routinely broken while trussed up and hung in local markets for human consumption, or skinned alive and cast off like garbage, for the despicable fur trade.
Dogs [both owned and stray] are relentlessly hunted down by ‘police authorized’ roving mobs and savagely beaten to death by the hundreds of thousands, in the name of ‘rabies’ control ”
I was raised in a culture where the killing of cows was acceptable, and the killing of dogs was not. I recall watching years ago on the television program, Law & Order, a case about the killing of horses. The horse killer got into major trouble, yet the cows were no big deal.
Aren’t humans funny?
Over the last few weeks, I’ve begun to have what I can only call “visuals” as I am in that half-way awake/sleep state.
I thought I would write up what I have seen so far.
The first one was a mountain with the sun behind it. My wife later gave me an envelope from where she works. Strangely enough, it was a pyramid with a sun behind it in almost the same position. I don’t think it was the same thing, though it was remarkably similar.
The next one, I saw the night sky – complete with stars and such. It was pretty neato and lasted for about 10-20 seconds.
Recently I saw a gallon of water upside down, and the later water being poured into a glass.
Most recently, this morning, I saw a candle light – followed by a much bigger flame area. My brother calls me up a couple hours later and tells me that he found out the potential “real” reason why a friend of ours killed himself. My brother tells me that this friend was a propane or gas service man. He said that our buddy was servicing a family’s home, but that the gas line was run right along side a heater line. A leak developed and the family got killed. Our friend blamed himself and couldn’t handle the guilt apparently. Of course, this friend was known to tell tall tales from time to time and was often subject to spells of depression, so who really knows.
A friend of mine informed me that we are given these things for a reason, but like a puzzle sometimes it takes awhile to put it all together. As you look back on your life, these things – signs and road posts would start to make sense only in retrospect at times.
Ain’t life funny?
I thought I would take down some notes and things I’ve observed recently.
In some of others’ past writings I’ve noted that picking up insights and such was mentioned and how that can be thrown off with too much of a certain type of thinking, etc.
I’ve been trying to figure this out more myself and have noted that I seem to come up with my best thoughts while in the shower. I’ve tried salt baths and such, but invariably (for now) I tend to get in a rush to get out of the tub and thus very limited insights come during a bath. The shower is a whole different matter for me though – at this present time. The point here is to experiment, because it seems that everyone is different.
As I was coming up the stairs this morning, I identified some interesting personality quirks. As I thought about these, I realized where they had come from. I was once in a bar with a bunch of Canadian firemen and picked up the expression “, eh?”. On a similar level, I picked up a certain facial expression from a former boss of mine for indicating disapproval without making a big fuss about something. In addition, there are certain words and phrases I will catch myself saying that are from this former boss of mine who was Australian – so from time to time, I’ll find myself switching into a bit of an Aussie expression on certain sentences or words.
Is this a fragment / quirk to work on?
I’m not sure.
Do these really matter? Probably not, but if it can help with identifying greater parts to work on then it is at least a starting point.
Gotta get me one of these babies: http://www.myzeo.com
As I try to work on this whole lucid dreaming thing, it may be helpful to have some understanding of when I enter various sleep cycles, etc.
I’m going to save up for this or get a bullet proof vest. Geez. Tough choice.
I’ve been trying to ramp up my lucid dreaming / out of body experiences / meditation. I tried a new herb called “Holy Basil” coupled with spinach for dinner, Vitamin B supplements, electric massager, Brainwave Mind Studios Volume II, fruits and vegetables throughout the day (very limited eating out), Valerian root supplement, etc. Although I had dreams last night, and remembered them, I was too lazy to get up and write them down. They weren’t excessively vivid though.I woke up around 5:47 this morning feeling relatively rested and decided to pray for what’s left of my marriage and my family. I prayed protection around her phone, her mind, her car, the kids, and the house where she resides at present.
I then got up and got rid of my water intake from the night before. I decided to lay down on the floor with a guided meditation track. I used the one from Kelly Howell called Universal Mind Meditation. Started with my breathing exercises and after about 20 minutes I started fading in and out again. During this phase I saw a mental image of gallon of distilled water – upside down. A bit later I saw another mental image (as though it were in my field of vision) of a glass of water being filled. I’m not sure what to make of those images.
I woke up briefly and rolled over onto my side almost in fetal position. It felt so comfortable. I could just lay like that for a long time. I then dozed off and started fading in and out. I realized my head was on top of a book and I started reading the book. I thought to myself, this is weird – I am dreaming, but there is sufficient resolution in the dream for me to read out of a book. Cool. I keep flipping pages, but they weren’t real pages. It was as though my mind was “seeing through” the pages and I was able to read without turning the pages by adjusting the level of transparency in each previous page or by adjusting the depth of my apparently see through vision.
I then got up sort of groggy. I didn’t see my body on the floor so I figured I was really awake. I turned to get up and peeked out the door to make sure no one was in the living room (I have a room-mate now). I was going to walk through really quick like and get a glass of water yet I was still naked as the day I was born, so I was sort of sneaking about all tip toe style.
I walked into the kitchen and thought, you know – “it sure is light in here. What’s with the lights being on?”. As I was contemplating this, I thought to myself “Perhaps I am still dreaming?”. “Let’s test this” I thought. I thought to myself “I need to get outside and see if I can find a license plate number or something to recall when I wake up, if I am dreaming. Well, I don’t know how much time I have. Let’s try to fly. If I can fly, then I am probably still dreaming.”
I jumped up and much to my delight and slight embarrassment my naked body is now soaring over the kitchen sink. As I made it over the counter, I went into what I now call “the white zone” where I knew I was still dreaming, yet was awake. This happened once before. It feels sort of like the static on a television with no actual signal being received.
Perhaps this is the narrow path that Yeshua spoke of. Straddling the point between conscious and subconscious, though I’m not really sure.
Some have informed me about the middle when performing breath exercises. It makes me wonder if it is similar when going between awake/dream state.
It was very difficult to maintain this state and I woke up.
I had been practicing rather attempting various “higher” thought forms over the last couple days and attempting to be more aware, but the scenario for this dream seemed to be driven once again by feeling lethargic as I dozed in and out. The lethargic / comfortable feeling seems to be driven by the right amount of heat, couple with perhaps time of day, spinach, and binaural tracks. One more thing to note, when I woke up at 5:47 AM – I was very very hungry.
Quoting the online article (italics below) at http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jun/in-no-time:
No one keeps track of time better than Ferenc Krausz. In his lab at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, he has clocked the shortest time intervals ever observed. Krausz uses ultraviolet laser pulses to track the absurdly brief quantum leaps of electrons within atoms. The events he probes last for about 100 attoseconds, or 100 quintillionths of a second. For a little perspective, 100 attoseconds is to one second as a second is to 300 million years.
But even Krausz works far from the frontier of time. There is a temporal realm called the Planck scale, where even attoseconds drag by like eons. It marks the edge of known physics, a region where distances and intervals are so short that the very concepts of time and space start to break down. Planck time—the smallest unit of time that has any physical meaning—is 10-43 second, less than a trillionth of a trillionth of an attosecond. Beyond that? Tempus incognito. At least for now.
Efforts to understand time below the Planck scale have led to an exceedingly strange juncture in physics. The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality. If so, then what is time? And why is it so obviously and tyrannically omnipresent in our own experience? “The meaning of time has become terribly problematic in contemporary physics,†says Simon Saunders, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford. “The situation is so uncomfortable that by far the best thing to do is declare oneself an agnostic.â€
Time is an illusion? Nah……
“From the cowardice that shrinks from new truth,
from the laziness that is content with half truth,
from the arrogance that thinks it has all the truth —
Oh, God of truth, deliver us!”
— Unknown
Quoting the online article at http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2009-06/11/content_8273771.htm
MOSCOW – An Italian woman who arrived late for the Air France plane flight that crashed in the Atlantic last week, killing all 228 on board, has died in a car accident, Italy’s ANSA news agency reported.
Johanna Ganthaler, a pensioner from the Bolzano-Bozen Province (South Tyrol), and her husband Kurt, were vacationing in Brazil and missed Air France flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on June 1. The couple took a flight to Europe later that day.
The car veered off the road near Kufstein, Austria, killing Johanna.