In the last post we looked at using dream interpretation as a tool for looking at the subconscious mind using a conscious effort.

In this article I’ll talk about using meditation as a tool to reduce the subconscious popcorn flying around in your head, reducing the amount that can affect your consciousness.

Meditation is an absolutely amazing tool and one that can give you the greatest results if you’re one of those people that can do a few things consistently. Meditation at it’s simplest consists of sitting in one place, closing your eyes, and focusing on the spot where your inhalations and exhalations are felt in your nose or on your upper lip.

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Seems pretty simple I know, but that’s all you need to do in order to have the most profound experiences available to you as a human being on this spinning blue ball. Can you handle something like this? Sure you can. If I can do it with attention deficit disorder (ADD) you can do it, I’m sure of it.

Some people tire of meditation. Yes, believe it or not - some have a lot of expectations about where their meditative sessions will lead them - and they become disappointed with the length of time it takes things to happen. Paradoxically, if you are really wanting something to happen - it won’t. Meditation itself is like a zen koan.

One meditates to get somewhere in their mind… to advance through the stages of meditation leading to jhana or other absorption experiences.

However, if one desires overtly to get somewhere. He or she will go nowhere really. Meditation is catch-22 like that. It doesn’t seem like it should make sense, but it does. Just not sense that we can rationalize using our minds. The book, Zen in the Art of Archery teaches how in order to let the perfect arrow fly from your bow you cannot make a conscious decision to let the arrow go. It must just go. If you focus too much on trying not to focus too much - you are focusing too much and the arrow will be off course. Likewise if you focus too much on meditating to reach high levels of meditation and you’re excited about getting there and anxious - you go nowhere.

Meditation takes persistence, I will say that. Though you’re only sitting for 15-30 minutes at a time you would be amazed how difficult it is to focus on the feeling of your breath in the nose for even 1 complete inhale and exhale. Then, once you’re able to do that you’ll be amazed how difficult it is to focus for 2 breaths. And so on… Yet, this is all that’s really required in order to send yourself down the path toward the most exhilarating experiences.

The mind has a natural tendency to produce thoughts. We all know that. However, you’ve likely not really seen thought for what it is. You’ve likely not watched it consciously for any period of time. As you sit and attempt to focus your entire mind on the feeling of the breath you’ll undoubtedly be taken away from that focus toward whatever the mind wants to churn up in the way of thoughts.

Are thoughts conscious or unconscious? You might question that for yourself as you begin meditating. You’ve probably never watched a thought form in your head and followed it to see what it does. As you meditate you will. Your attention will be pulled away from focusing on the breath to something more interesting that the mind cooks up. You might follow that thought as it builds adding more thoughts around the original focus of the thought. Or, you might follow it as it branches off 16 different ways into different thoughts entirely that are all linked loosely to the first thought. The thought-chains that are created can be brought to conscious awareness if you look at them - apply attention to them. Otherwise they are in the background… in the space between conscious and subconscious. They are being fueled by the unconscious during meditation but you could choose to ‘think’ about something and the thoughts become conscious and focused around whatever subject you chose.

The simple act of meditation does a couple things initially:

1. Focuses the mind on a small task with a tiny sensory footprint.
2. Relaxes the body completely so there is no bodily stress or concerns.
3. Trains the mind to re-focus on the area of attention repeatedly so that it becomes second nature after a while.
4. Slows down the barrage of thoughts that are being churned out.

As the number of thoughts becomes lessened the mind starts to achieve a strength that maybe you haven’t known before. It’s a kind of power that enables you to focus for progressively longer periods of time on one very small sensory input - the feeling of your breath coming in and out at some tiny spot around the nose and upper lip.

Eventually the mind-candy slows waaaay down and you’re able to experience brief moments without thought. Eventually these moments get longer. Absorption experiences start. Jhana starts. Eventually this process transforms the mind into something amazing. The mind becomes strong and unaffected by things that used to cause it discomfort… neurosis. You’ll notice that you’re relatively unaffected by things that used to bother you.

Why is that - are you a zombie now?

No! Meditation makes you much more alive than you ever were before. It gives you a new perspective on life as you realize how much time, energy, and efforts were wasted on things that really don’t matter. You’ll begin to experience life in the present moment as you never could have understood before. You may have read books on the present moment, Thich Nhat Hanh - a Vietnamese Buddhist monk has an amazing series of books you can find on mindfulness and the present moment. You might want to read those as you get started, they are a wonderful aid to help you practice getting into the present moment.

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One benefit of meditation is that your subconscious that’s filled with fear, anger, and sadness churns out less dysfunctional material over time. See, when you’re sitting there quiet and watching the breath your subconscious will continually throw up a lot of information from the past that it wants you to look at. If you choose to you can look at it.

Everyone has painful memories of experiences from the past. Sitting quietly helps to bring those up. Occasionally you might cry during meditation because all the sudden sad thoughts overwhelm you and your eyes flood with tears. That’s a good thing. For major things like this it’s good to put meditation on hold and really think about the issue that brought tears to your eyes.

What is the reality of the situation? Can you change something? Often times you can change something about it… you can make a phone call, write a letter or even role-play out some interaction from the past with a friend you have now. You can change what happened in the past with the new role play situation and it can change your life from that time forward.

Nothing from the past has the power to affect you once you decide to eliminate it. It can’t. It’s finished. Done with. There is far too much present and future available to continue your life in a different way, a more functional and better way.

In fact, the only thing about the past that is still there - are the memories in your head about it. That’s IT. The action doesn’t exist anymore. It existed at one time and then it disappeared. Nobody in the world can bring it back. The memories you have about the issue are the only thing that exists - and you know - memories are only tiny electrical impulses… Change them by facing them and then doing things differently from today forward.

My father left my mother, me and my brother and sister when I was five or six years old. He did his part to come see us once a week usually and I can’t blame him for leaving as it was the right thing to do. For a long time I had memories of him and they made me feel sad. Sometime about my mid-teens I remember my girlfriend asking me if I missed my dad and if I had sad thoughts all the time about him. I told her, “Sure, I still think about him occasionally.”

But you know what? I spent the next couple days looking at the reality of the situation. He had left nearly 10 years before. He wasn’t mean to me or abusive to me in any way. He was just not there. Society was telling me that he should be there but when I thought about it myself… it didn’t really matter that he wasn’t there. I didn’t really need him close by and part of my life I realized. I got along fine from the time he left and I didn’t really know him.

Why would I want someone I didn’t know to interact with me more? The reality was, overall it really made no difference at all whether he was there or not. At that point I let go whatever dysfunction my memories and my subconscious were churning out. I moved forward. I don’t dislike my father. I just don’t know him. Should I know him? Society would answer - YES, you must know your father. You must care about him. You must do whatever you can to get close and remain close to him.

I think, what for? I’ve known lots of other people… To me it’s neither here nor there now and I’m happy in my own mind not thinking about him on a daily or weekly basis. Since my mid teens I can’t remember a time when I missed him or thought that I was missing out on a part of life for not having him as a close friend.

Even major things like this can be quickly gotten over if you just analyze the reality of the situation and realize that the only thing that exists are your memories. Question them. Question your beliefs. Question what society is telling you. You’re your own person. Nobody else is looking out for you like YOU are. Change you memories or change your present life such that the old memories don’t matter that much or have less power and you change your life.

So, if you’re crying as you sit and meditate that’s a great thing because you’ve just found something from the past that you can look at and eventually rid yourself of. There’s nothing too great, nothing too powerful to screw up the rest of your life. You gave it the power to affect you up until now - and now you can get rid of it. Don’t ignore it. Now’s the perfect opportunity to destroy it.

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And so meditation provides this opportunity to quell the craziness in your mind that surely exists to some degree like it does in all of us. In fact, if you had no craziness you wouldn’t dream at all.

After a year of meditation you know what?

I didn’t dream at all for the next five or so years (I didn’t count, I’m using five as a minimum though). It was amazing to realize that the subconscious had no reason to create dreams anymore. Just outrageous really. My mind was so calm and at peace with the past, present and future that it didn’t create dreams for a long time.

Gradually after 5+ years the dreams slowly started again about events that I was stressing out over. I had stopped meditating after a year and I’ve no doubt that if I would have continued the dreamless state would have also.

Today I still have dreams, but they seem to be related to not achieving goals that I have fast enough. I don’t dreams about fear, anxiety or sadness about past events. I have dreams about the future and not being where I want to be. I think this gives me the motivation on a daily level I need to sustain over time so I reach all those goals.

I’ve started meditating again recently and already I’ve noticed that my mind is quiet and balanced when I shut my eyes and focus on my breath. I have little thought - little extraneous material popping into the conscious from that nether region between sub and conscious awareness.

Meditation is an incredible tool and one that is available to you:

1. Today
2. For free.
3. As much as you want.

Mind-blowing benefits are waiting for you with practice of as little as 30 minutes a day.

I think meditation is the most important thing you can possibly do for 30 minutes. I can’t name anything that even approaches it as a close 2nd. Nothing. Nothing has the power to change your life so completely.

I’ve created a 22-Day meditation e-book course on PDF (right click, choose “save target or file as…”) if you’re interested in downloading it:

22-Day Meditation Course, Meditation without Religion >

I’ve considered revising it to add a lot of information but if I do that I’ll likely turn it into a publishable book instead. For now - grab it for free and get started!

If you have any questions about meditation as you begin feel free to write me and I’ll help however I can. I’m not a Buddhist teacher or any other kind of teacher. I follow no religion about meditation myself and I can offer nothing but the reality of how I did it and the truth of what it did for me.

It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever experienced and I know it would be for you too!

Here are some links to videos I did about my experiences with meditation. These are in no particular order, they are just numbered as a series.

Experience 1: Body relaxed, mind starts to follow

Exp 2:  Breath slows, body starts disappearing

Exp 3:  Fatness

Exp 4:  Consciousness expands

Exp 5:  Denseness of body

Exp 6:  Bliss & Joy

Exp 7:  Highly concentrated mind

Exp 8:  One pointedness of mind

Exp 9:  Dying - no breath

Exp 10:  Interconnected cosmos, at “one with all”

Exp 11:  Just as it is…

Exp 12:  Visualizations

Here are two audio links for mp3 files (best to right click and “save target (file) as…”) of me talking about my experience with meditation and what occurred:

Meditation History, Pt. 1 >

Meditation History, Pt. 2 >

Good luck on your path to a higher consciousness through eliminating dysfunctional material in your subconscious!

Best of Life!

Vern

As I was going through my undergrad psychology program I got really interested in finding out about myself. I wanted to know everything I could about me. Why am I like this? Who am I? Why is this group of things important to me but not to other people? Why are some things of great importance to other people not important to me at all? What is my intelligence? What is the ultimate goal of life? Why are we here as human beings?

I began devouring books on western philosophy, Hinduism, Buddhism, the Hare Krishna movement, transcendental meditation, Vipassana meditation, Hatha Yoga, Chakras, hypnotism and many other subjects. I also began meditating at this time which I’ve talked about a little bit in my posts here but that’s covered more in-depth in my bio.

I knew some of the “why” questions about life were unanswerable but I wanted to find the answers I could about me. That was the most important thing I thought - figure myself out. In a short time it became apparent that I had to do whatever was possible to eliminate the negatives I was carrying around as baggage. If I got rid of my baggage I could begin to fully optimize my consciousness. Apparently there was negative material in the conscious and the unconscious (subconscious) and it was apparent that the subconscious was the place to start, it being the more primary level.

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In the psych program I was learning a lot about the mind and Freud’s interpretation of how the subconscious (unconscious) affects our lives.

Freud said, “Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.”

We had some classes about dream interpretation and I realized I really needed to start looking closely at my dreams to find some of the answers I was looking for. In particular, the dysfunctions show up rather overtly in dreams. I knew from my studies that dreams were really important as indicators of what’s going on underneath the conscious mind and that they could help me become a better person. Less stressed. Less dysfunctional.

Dreams happen while parts of our brain are active during sleep. Dreams are both psychological and physiologically based.

Physiologically, states of sleep are measured using an electroencephalograph (EEG) attached to the scalp by small electricity sensing electrodes. Using the EEG tiny amounts of brain activity called “waves” are recorded. There are two distinct types of brain wave activity during sleep: Non-rapid eye movement (NREM) and Rapid eye movement (REM).

NREM sleep consists of four stages the sleeper enters progressively, passing deeper states as larger and slower brain waves prevail. Stage 1 marks the transition between being awake and Stage 1 sleep. In this stage brain wave activity goes from beta waves indicating wakefulness, to alpha waves. Stage 2 is light sleep. The body prepares for deep sleep by moving through theta waves to delta waves. Stages 3 and 4 are deep sleep stages characterized by prominent delta waves with Stage 4 being the most intense.

In REM sleep, brain activity is heightened, similar to the awakened stage 1 state with some differences. The eyes remain closed, but move back and forth from left to right, sometimes rapidly. The muscles of the body are usually paralyzed during REM sleep. This is a good thing because during a bad dream the dreamer is prevented from harming himself or others. Heart rate and respiration increase. Dreams are most easily recalled while woken up in this state of REM sleep.

I noticed I remembered my dreams the most clearly on nights when I woke up around 5am for a restroom trip. When I awoke again later after falling asleep again I had a lot of trouble recalling the details of my dreams. It seemed that 5am was about the best time for me to recall them.

I bought a mini-digital voice recorder so I could record my dreams as soon as I woke up, enabling a much better recall and in-depth analysis later that same day.

Your subconscious mind is incessantly throwing dysfunctional thoughts around like a hurricane full of popcorn. Occasionally some of that popcorn blows up out of the subconscious and into the conscious mind where you might think about it or ignore it all within a fraction of a second. If your subconscious is filled with fear about different issues, then the “fear popcorn” flies up into your conscious mind often and is able to influence your thoughts and decisions there. This fear popcorn can then influence your present actions, plans, future actions and your entire life really. It’s nothing to ignore, you need to take strong action to resolve whatever dysfunctional popcorn your brain is continually cooking up.

I’m a strong believer in removing all the major types of popcorn flying around in your subconscious so you can have a conscious life that is almost entirely uninterrupted by negative subconscious influences.

Subconscious material is usually based around fear, anger and sadness. In graduate study my practicum professor, Dr. Barry Naster (Hamid) shared with me his theory about treating people with mental disability. He used the acronym, “FLASH” to designate the 5 basic feelings every person has. Fear. Love. Anger. Sadness. Happiness. Notice there are 3 negative and 2 positive emotions?

Of these, fear, love and sadness tend to really influence our dreams. Our dreams arise from material in the subconscious that hasn’t been dealt with adequately in the conscious mind. The subconscious will cook up popcorn around this material for 72 years until you die if you never deal with it.

“Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives,” said William Demen. This view comes from the idea that dreams are formed as a way for us to deal with unresolved issues in our minds. Things that we’d dare not do socially in front of people can be acted out in the safe environment of dreams. Those with a lot of these socially unacceptable desires will have more dreams of this nature.

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I think most of my dreams are of the fear, sadness and anger variety. But I can see that some of them had unresolved desire components that couldn’t be acted out socially too. Dreams appear to offer a safe place to let your mind question everything and do everything that it needs to do to resolve the desires and questions it has. If the dream is especially emotional it will push that content to the conscious mind in the form of memory when you wake up or it might even wake you up as you’re dreaming about it.

For many years I had dreams about walking through the woods and seeing bears unexpectedly. In this case, it was actually BEARS that I was afraid of due to some horror stories I was told while camping by my uncles and my mom’s friend. Alligators were a big thing too, though that was based on something else. Then there were the tornado dreams. Of course I had the common falling off a cliff dream occasionally too.

I began interpreting each dream so I could rid myself of the subconscious popcorn and live a more free, balanced life that was uninfluenced by fears, sadness and anger from the past. Here’s how.

If you are currently able to remember your dreams when first waking up then you’re ready to go. Or maybe you are like me and the early morning restroom trip is an almost nightly occurrence and you remember your dreams then. Great. If you don’t remember your dreams when you wake up, no matter because you’re probably having them, you just need to change when you wake up. Try setting your alarm to wake earlier, don’t worry you’ll probably be able to return to sleep after dictating your dreams - if not, no harm done because you’re awake at an early hour when everyone is sleeping! It can be a very productive time of day! What you’re doing is important enough that you must make yourself wake up. Think like that. Act like that. Make it happen.

If you normally wake at 7am, set your alarm for 6am. Do you remember your dreams when you wake up? If not, try 5am. If not, try 4am. If not - and so on. People dream most heavily during the last stages of sleep so you shouldn’t have to wake up much before 4am! I notice If I wake at 5:30am I’m able to remember the most clearly. Usually I’m sleeping by 10:30 - 11pm at night.

Before you sleep set your alarm and put the recorder close to your bed and within a short reach. If you’re using your phone to record, as I did for a while, make sure you find the voice recording program in your list of applications and set it up before you sleep. In the early hours you don’t want to be fumbling around clicking 16 buttons to get started recording. You should be able to roll over, grab the recorder and click once or twice to start recording.

You may notice during recording that you’re making NO sense at all. That’s OK. Sometimes that happens and it will be even more bizarre later when you listen to it awake, believe me. It’s hilarious actually.

After you wake up and you have some time to begin analyzing your dream(s) get a pad of paper and pen and make sure you’ll be free of distractions. Start playing the first bit from your recorder. When one sentence has passed STOP the recorder and write it down. Leave a few spaces and play and stop again after one sentence, writing it down exactly as you said it into the recorder.

Once you’ve copied down the entire dream you shouldn’t go on to the next one which might be influenced by what you just heard and wrote down from the first dream.

Start reading over your first sentence. Look at the words you used. Bear? Dog? Honolulu? I always look at the nouns first and as I say them I might realize the word means something more than what it does at face value. Dreams are made of symbols. The word is a symbol for something else. Dreams are built on these symbols. The mind puts together a story based on symbols and what words really mean - to create the dream. It’s what the word means to you that’s important, not the face value of the word. However, some words might mean exactly what they are - you know? Sometimes certain symbols in your dream mean the same as they do for other people. Sometimes your symbols are unique. Don’t let someone tell you what your symbols mean. Dream interpretation should be phenomenologically based (specific to each person).

So, I do a quick free-association for each noun and see what else comes up as a possible meaning. For ‘bear’ maybe “Professor Sanocki” comes to mind. For ‘dog’ maybe “taking care of” comes to mind. For ‘Honolulu’ - maybe it means “home” to me. And so on. Write down what each noun means to you - really means to you in your mind.

Once you go through the sentence for nouns, check the other words and phrases. See if they might mean something other than what they appear to be. Maybe they won’t. Finish one sentence before going to the next. When the dream interpretation is finished then read over it and try to get the overall feeling about the dream. Was it fear about something? Anger? Sadness?

Then, define more clearly what fear, sadness, anger or combination of these the dream was really about. What is the issue that needs dealt with about these feelings? Can you name it? That’s the goal, name exactly the situation, the memory, the ongoing problem that is going to keep making subconscious popcorn until you address it.

Different problems in the subconscious require more or less thought about them before they disappear. If the major feeling in your dream was fear that you’d forget your combination lock at school - then it wouldn’t take much more than writing it down on the side of your rubber soled shoe in order to stop that dream. For me in high school this was one of my fears. I refused to write down the combination and I had many locks. One for my bike, one for my soccer locker, and one for my regular school locker. I had the dream all through high school and even into college about forgetting the combination to my locks. I could have taken care of it back then and it would have vanished if I’d just given it some thought and created a solution.

Freud’s idea was that the meaning of all dreams was about unfulfilled sexual desire and impulses. He might interpret my dream about failing to remember my locker combination as really meaning I was impotent. You might guess that I don’t put much credence in that line of thinking. Freud had some incredible ideas and much of it is still in use today. However, his head seemed to be planted firmly in his crotch as he attributed the meaning of everything to be of a sexual nature.

Your dream might be as simple to resolve as my combination lock dream. Even as simple as it was, it caused me bad dreams and stress for a long time. The feeling of dread as I went up to my soccer locker and tried many number combinations that didn’t work, and the soccer bus was leaving without me because I couldn’t get my uniform was a really sick feeling. Something so simple created so much negative energy over years of time.

So even the small issues are worth fixing quickly. If you have some major issue that you need to resolve you might need to spend a lot of time thinking about it consciously and working out the reality of it. Reality kills the power that fear, anger and sadness have. You might have had a bad experience years ago and you dream about it. Getting over it so it doesn’t have the power to affect your life anymore might take a couple days. It might take a week or month of counseling. It might take refocusing your mind on other areas. It might take talking to the person you had the bad experience with - or role playing talking to the person and getting it out out of your system. It might take hypnosis, aversive therapy, or behavior modification.

Whatever it takes - get it the hell out of your system and stop letting it affect your life. If you don’t, the most ridiculous and the most devastating experiences will have the power to be relived over and over as the subconscious pops the corn day after day and night after night.

Dream interpretation can help you resolve nearly every issue in your life because dreams are like a peek into your own private world of dysfunction - and all of us have one.

Once you can interpret the real meaning to the symbols in the dream and get at the feelings, eventually being able to define the exact problem that’s causing the bad dreams you’re on your way to a much more fulfilling, stress free, happy life!

USE your bad dreams to fix you. It’s not brain surgery and you probably don’t need to see a psychologist. Put the time in to do some dream work and get to know all your dysfunctions and go about systematically resolving them through dream interpretation one by one.

Though I don’t believe in the Scientologists’ game plan for living their lives or that the e-meters they use have any credence at all, I do believe that they’re on the right track with attempting to become free of subconscious and conscious garbage that stays in the mind until we do something about it.

Ideally we need to identify all our conscious and subconscious dysfunctional thoughts, memories, habits, superstitions,  and then work on getting rid of every one of them.

So, you can go about things this way as one method to become self actualized or move to a higher consciousness that is less affected by the subconscious… or there’s another way. I don’t know if I’d call it easier for everyone, but for me it was much easier.

That will be the next article…

Quieting Recurring Subconscious Popcorn Through Meditation

Best of Life!

Vern

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I frequently get asked a question by new friends and old friends once they realize it.

“Why don’t you wear any jewelry or even a watch?”

I’ve got this idea in my head that jewelry, watches, hair, clothes and tattoos don’t add anything to “me” that I want added to me. Like shaving my head… hair adds a dimension I don’t need to deal with. Nothing positive comes out of having a head of hair. It pulls my attention toward something that doesn’t make a bit of difference in my life - strands of shiny protein growing like wild weeds on my head. Could I keep them tamed down enough to fit into American society? Sure I could. But, is there a point to that?

As I mentioned in a previous article, “Cheating on Your Spouse? Consider this…” one of the major cravings in life is sex. If you look good to others in society you’re going to have a hell of a time ignoring this subject while you’re married. It’s essential to ignore it while you’re married though. If you’re devastatingly good looking like a Brad Pitt - having looks, cash and free time you’re doomed. Cutting off the hair on your head - as a man or woman is a great start. People will treat you differently - more objectively. Not based on your looks. The rest of my appearance sort of adheres to that same idea. There’s no need to impress anyone with what I’m wearing.

Shaving my head and not having jewelry is not a reaction to society. I’m not rebelling. Years ago I looked at the watch I had on my wrist and wondered why it was there. What is it doing for me? Aren’t I surrounded by clocks? There was a clock in my car, in my office, at various points all over the company I worked at. There was a clock in my phone and on my notebook and desktop computers. There was a clock on everyone elses wrist. Why did I need one? Though my watch was a gift - I put it in a drawer and haven’t put it on since.

Wearing necklaces stopped as I entered the Air Force years ago - I’d lost many over the years and always replaced them. The last one I lost at 18 years old and never replaced it.

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Bracelets - I’ve never worn a bracelet until recently here in Thailand. Let me explain… as part of going to the temple there are these Buddhist nuns that sit inside the temple and wait for foreigners to come in so they can put these braided brown bracelets on their wrist and get them to sign the guest book. Now - I don’t care personally about wearing one of these, but on the other hand - when someone wants to put it on me because it means something to them - I don’t want to be rude by refusing. Thais’ have this concept of ‘face’ that’s hard for westerners to understand but I’ve got a pretty good handle on it now. To refuse anything offered causes the other person to lose face.

So - I keep the bracelet on as long as it remains a neither positive or negative consequence. It’s when it starts to smell that I take it off.

I don’t wear a ring - even when I am married. To me the idea of putting a ring on as a symbol of marriage is simply ridiculous. The symbol of my marriage is what I do with my wife every day. How I treat her. How I show her that I love her. The ring is an external symbol to others that I can afford a gold ring and a diamond and gold ring for my wife. It’s also a comment on my relationship status which is not anyone’s business but mine. Some women pay more attention to guys with wedding rings. Why is that? I don’t need that kind of woman around me when I’m married. When I’m single - hell yes. But I’m not going to wear a wedding ring when I’m single either. When married - no point. I don’t get wedding rings. I don’t wear them.

I haven’t needed glasses so far - so that’s a non-issue. I’m not sure if I’d choose to wear glasses or contacts. The choice would be made entirely on what felt best and made the most sense… do contacts feel good? Is the experinece better than glasses? If yes, I’d wear them. If I couldn’t get used to the routine of sticking them in my eyes everyday and if I often lost them in my eye-socket I’d wear glasses. Would I wear some cool style of glasses that cost me $300+. Nah. My glasses would be the most basic glasses that exist. If I could find frames for $15, I’d buy those.

My clothes are unremarkable. I’m lucky enough to live where I don’t need a lot of clothes. I’ve got 3 pair of shorts and about 9 shirts. My shoes are sport sandals - almost 3 years old. They don’t smell and they’re very comfortable. Nobody would call them fashionable by any stretch, but they are “Nike” brand. I do a lot physically and Nike sport sandals have served me very well for 8 years, I’ll buy another pair when these wear out. Not because they’re Nikes, but because they are built very well and so far have taken the torture of climbing up and down more than 692,000 steps at a local mountain temple over the past 10 months. That’s a tough shoe!

I’ve one pair of pants and some thin nylon sweatpants.

The nicest shirt I have cost $9 USD at the store, new. Most of my clothes are used as I can buy them for $2-3. You might think it’s easy to dress down living in Thailand and blogging for a living. It is. However, if I moved back to the USA - to Hawaii most likely, I wouldn’t change what I wore with the exception of probably needing to buy some pants to keep up with the company dress code. As much as I’d like to continue blogging as my only income maker - in Hawaii I’d need to get another job as well. In the states I think it’d be easy to get by on $15 jeans or other cotton casual dress pants and a $10 shirt.

My choice of clothes is somewhat of a reaction to society and the crazy ideal that people in business try to adhere to. There was a time when I bought expensive pants, shirts and shoes. Why? I thought I had to fit in. I was in management at a resort firm in Hawaii. I was the marketing manager. I thought I had to dress with $100+ silk aloha shirts and Polo pants everyday. I spent a hell of a lot on clothes. When I think back to that time - I ask myself - who was I impressing? Other people at my job? Those that I saw at our hotels and timeshares everyday? What would have happened if I didn’t dress like that? Nothing. It was in my mind. Probably it’s in your mind too.

I don’t have tattoos or piercings. I don’t want anyone to look at me because I have a design on my arm that is similar to hundreds of others people have already seen. The nicest tattoo I’ve ever seen was on my friend Justin, a teacher from Canada (see pic). It was amazing, great color - really great picture. The thing is - I don’t believe our skin was made for pictures. As good as it was I’ll bet I could find 1000 pieces of artwork of the same scene that I like better than the image on his arm. I just don’t ‘get’ tattoos. I don’t understand. I don’t believe I’d have more self-esteem with a tattoo. Probably I’d feel less - like I was silly enough to get a picture on my arm like everyone else because I’m not confident enough in myself to go against what my friends are doing.

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I think there are so few people in this world that are following their own ideas. We want to do what others in a subculture are doing because it makes us feel like we’re rebelling against mainstream society. It’s also to become accepted in the new subculture. We want to go against the grain - but just a little bit. Rarely does someone want to really rebel against society. If he did he might pierce part of a metal door through the skin of his scalp and carry around the door all day. You don’t see that too often. You don’t see someone tattoo polka dots the size of a quarter all over their body either. Or stars. Snowflakes. That’d be different. Why doesn’t anyone do that?

So, for me - I think that the less someone is looking at my clothes, my jewelry, and my tattoos - the better. I’m more interesting than that. I’m more approachable than someone looking like a magazine ad for Polo. Interact with ME, not what I’m wearing. Not what you see. Interact with what’s in my head -not on the outside of my head.

So, that’s why I don’t wear jewelry… and a lot more!

Best of Life!

Vern

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This applies to a man or a woman, though a woman would probably have much more success with it. What have you got to lose? Just your marriage if you don’t try it!

Cut off all the hair from your head.

In 1996 as I began to meditate I realized something about the way women looked at me. They lusted after me to put it bluntly. I’m not Brad Pitt and I’m not a political powerhouse or wealthy mogul. But I realized something back then. I’m pretty damn attractive. Too attractive to have these women drooling over me because I was newly married and didn’t need the aggravation. Come on guys, you know what I’m talking about. (I hope this came across as humor!)

So, I was recently married and I was getting the usual eye-traffic coming my way at the university where I was finishing up graduate school. Being a student of psychology I enjoyed doing little social experiments to see if I could learn something about life. After a visit to see my brother in New York I decided I’d cut my hair down to about one eighth of an inch and see if people looked at me differently. My brother, who has been effectively bald since the age of twenty-one told me that not having hair is different than having hair. People don’t treat him the way they treat me because I have hair. He seemed to be jealous of me having hair when he didn’t - especially since I was older by four years.

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My head was shaved in the Air Force years before - but that was done at the base where every man’s head was shaved. I wanted to see - does hair make a difference in how people treat me? Specifically, I wanted to see - do women treat me in a different way than when I had hair. Friends and strangers - were there differences that I could perceive?

I bought some clippers and put on the #1 level plastic piece. A “1″ is a close cut. It’s 1/4 to 1/8″ of an inch. It took all of five minutes to clip it all off. Wow. I went from a preppy and adorable full head of dirty blond hair down to stubble in minutes. It was comical to look at myself in the mirror. Already I knew the answer - people would definitely treat me differently. I couldn’t even come to grips with the new look for a few days.

Over the next few weeks I noticed a very real change in the way my friends treated me.

The most common question asked was, WHY did you do that? Apparently the shock of reality was almost too much for my female friends who thought me attractive before. They said things like, “It looked so much better before.” “Why do you want to look like a skinhead?” Apparently my head was so white because my hair was blond that I looked like a skinhead to some. I didn’t act like a skinhead any more than I did with hair - but, this was the reaction I got from some people. Apparently the stubble-head incites fear in some. I guess I did look skinheadish - but inside I couldn’t have been further from that.

I noticed a huge difference in the behavior of strangers toward me. Prior to shaving my head I got a fair number of looks my way during the day. I think everyone at the university gets their fair share of looks since out of 35,000 students there must be 100 that think any person looks good enough to make eye contact with.

Well, after I shaved my head I didn’t get the usual looks and eye contact that I got before. I still got some - and it wasn’t from people staring because I looked like a skinhead. I don’t think anyway. I began to get looks from a different type of person that I didn’t get looks from before. Bad girls. Girls with tattoos and smoking outside the classrooms, even teenagers would look at me quite a bit more and smile. It was bizarre. When I had hair I can’t remember ever having a bad girl look my way or go out of her way to make eye contact with me. When I had no hair - apparently they thought I was a bad boy and that appealed to them.

With friends they seemed to distance themselves from me a little bit. It seemed like they acted more seriously toward me and didn’t joke around or flirt as much if they were girl friends.

Anyway - a very interesting experiment that you should try as a man. As a woman I think you would experience really profound differences in the way men and other women treated you. Some would look at you as if you had turned lesbian. Some would think you a skinhead. Some would think you have a medical problem. Some would think you had a mental problem.

I’m considering making social experiments a part of this web site. I have a few more to share with you from growing up in the USA - but, since now I’m in Thailand - I wonder about the generalizability of experiments I do here. Would you still find them interesting? Not sure.

Here in Thailand I’ve shaved my head - sometimes with a razor (see pic) - just so I don’t have to think about hair being mashed down by my motorbike helmet. It’s cooler and nobody gives me strange looks here. The Thai women also have a similar reaction as in America. Less looks after I clip or shave my head. It’s really strange to realize the effect first-hand.

So - if you’re cheating or plan on cheating or could see yourself cheating - shave your head as soon as possible. Use a razor and go totally hairless if you’re just too sexy for your own good.  See how sexy you are then.

Huh?  Still too sexy?  Shave your legs and arms too.

STILL?  Shave your eyebrows smooth and pluck your eyelashes.

STILL??????? Ok, Ok, see a professional I can’t help.

Best of Life!

Vern

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