Universal Language

Does being a musician make you bilingual? I can only speak English, but music is definitely it’s own language. It’s a form of communication that allows us to hear a piece of music and instantly be teleported to whatever landscape of emotion the writer intended. We can hear a voice singing in a language we don’t even know and yet somehow still understand and even relate.

Music, like all languages, has it’s written form.
The weird part about this for me is that I can’t read the universal notation, I just developed my own version by listening and loving music and jamming with various players over the years. One of my favorite, if not my favorite, part of music is songwriting. I love figuring out the emotional equation for delivering a song’s message the most effectively. Being able to read music is something I definitely want to learn in time, but for now I like to think this means I speak my own type of slang in music.. Or maybe I’m just tootin’ my own horn. *Da dun ksshhh!*

Choice.

Our lives are full of choices. With the amount of freedom we have in America, our choices are mostly ours to make, too. Our choices can put us on a road toward the life we’ve always wanted for ourselves, or down dark and dangerous alleys where we might find a permanent residence.
Our free will allows us to make any choice we can fathom making no matter how heroic, rewarding, selfish or evil. We can even make the choice to take our own lives either slowly with addiction or straight up suicide.

But if you really begin to embrace your free will and explore it’s potential, you can tap in to an area of yourself where choices are made all the time and you don’t even realize it.
We have the ability to change our current moods and states of mind with a simple choice.
When we allow ourselves to believe Monday is gonna be a shitty day because it’s a Monday, that’s our choice.
When we dwell in our misery and recap scenes from our lives where we were hurt, humiliated or look back with anger, regret, guilt or blame, that’s a choice we make.
When we fear the future and let that fear hold us back from achieving our goals and sabotage ourselves, that’s our choice to let it play out how we feared it would!

Choosing to live like this can implode somebody with all of the negativity it brings. It causes stress that can manifest in physical ailments. I know this because I experienced it. I literally felt ill all the time and didn’t know why until I changed my mood and my body changed with it! The pursuit of happiness can be more like a pursuit of life and being happy doing it.. If you choose to look at it that way.

Make the choice to be happy. Ask yourself what choosing to be upset or worried or sad or guilty is really gonna do for you.
Believe that you not only deserve happiness, but that you’re capable of experience it regardless of what your situation is.

It’s so cliché, but seriously, the choice is yours.

Pseudoscience; oxygen

Please keep in mind I did no extensive research on this topic and I hardly consider myself a scientist, but I had an interesting thought that I wanted to share and I’m also hoping someone(s) can expound on this thought.

Oxygen. It’s the air we breathe and essential for life on earth, right? I know it’s not entirely oxygen in the air we breathe (the air is actually more nitrogen than oxygen) but for the sake of not venturing too deep in to the chemistry of this and keeping more on a philosophical level, we’ll call air; oxygen.

The part about oxygen that I’ve been trippin’ on is that it’s a chemical. Granted, this chemical is not only unavoidable and absolutely necessary, but a chemical nonetheless. A chemical like any other foreign chemical/substance you might introduce to your body (i.e. THC, mescaline, psilocybin, carbon dioxide, caffeine, Viagra etc.).. Bare with me.

So my question is; are we in any way under the influence of the very chemical we breathe to survive? Would the city or country we grow up in and the air of that environment we breathe treat our bodies and minds differently than if we were to live or visit elsewhere? I’m gonna say, yes. The difference may be so slight that you can’t accurately measure it’s effect, but there’s still a difference.

To take it to another extreme, what if the air on earth was completely different in it’s chemical composition?
Hypothetically, what if you are the exact same person you are now but somehow your chemical makeup was altered so that you lived by breathing helium? Aside from having a really high and annoying voice, what effects would that have on the body and mind!?

Maybe I’m on to something and probably not, but one thing is for sure; we’re all reluctant addicts under the influence of the essential opiate for the masses; oxygen.

Breaking Up With God?

I want to start this blog by saying first and foremost I am not attacking faith, hope, love, or the individuals right to believe whatever they feel in their heart.. However, this will come off as a jab at religion in general. I don’t mean to offend, I’m merely sharing my experiences involving religion and the church. I encourage believers and non-believers alike to keep an open mind.

This is a before, during, and after story about my time in the church.

I have always had a spiritual nature about me. I believe we all do, it’s inherent. Some people are content with accepting that we can’t know for sure why we’re here and what for, but I and others like myself need something more than that. The pressure to ease my nerves on the issue of life after death became so intense that it was as if my survival and sanity depended on reaching a conclusion!
I remember as a kid I would have thoughts about eternity that would bring on panic attacks and I’d have sleepless nights of wondering and worrying about what happens after you die.

It wasn’t until I was 15 that I was introduced through a friend to Christianity.
It flipped my world upside down.
Not only did I feel this overwhelming sense of clarity being able to finally answer the million dollar questions in my life, but I went from being an everyday teenage hooligan to a christian poster boy. I sang in the church band on Sunday mornings, read my bible almost daily and surrounded myself with people who were “like minded” Christians. I even transferred from a public high school to a private Christian school.

For years all seemed right in the world. There were still those doubts that would leer their ugly heads once and a while, but I wrote them off as either God testing my faith or the devil using the usual tactics to turn me to the dark side. You know the classic doubts; dinosaurs, Noah’s ark and the flood, Jonah and the whale, Moses parting the red sea.. And that’s just the old testament.

Around this same time I was starting to feel under constant scrutiny by the church, like I was being monitored to see what a good or bad Christian I was being all the time. I started to see how unfair and how unrealistic the standards of the church are and how those standards can lead someone to surrounding their life in feelings of extreme guilt, fear and allowing no room in their life for being an individual. This led me to question what really made Christianity any different than any other religion.
All religions, when you get down to it, are just different interpretations of how/why we’re here and what for.
Christianity (especially in America) is the most popular, the most tolerated, and pretty damn rich. Just because something has more followers doesn’t mean it’s any more right (i.e. Justin Bieber, Jersey Shore, so on and so forth).
The point is, I had come to a crossroads in my life.
There was never a finite moment in time when I denounced my faith and never looked back, but over time I started to see a very distinct line between religion and spirituality.
We don’t NEED to subscribe to a certain religion in order to experience or feel spiritual or even experience the supernatural. What we NEED to do as a species is start taking joy and comfort in the fact that we’re not alone in feeling like there is something more to this all. I wish we were able to share our love and appreciation for one another’s religious beliefs, but as history has showed us, it doesn’t really work like that.
It doesn’t matter if you were born in America, Uganda, Iraq, India, China or wherever! It doesn’t matter if you’re gay, straight, republican or democrat! The fact remains that we’re all here together and we all feel, something. God, the universe, whatever it is we can all agree on a presence of some sort or some kind of feeling we get when contemplating the universe and our existence.

I know it might sound ambitious, even cliché and probably really sacrilegious, but I believe we need to seriously reconsider religion in general if we wish to achieve peace on earth. We’re moving toward a future in technology that is either going to prove extremely beneficial scientifically, educationally, medically and peacefully.. Or prove to destroy us with our also advanced military technology in the hands of either religious extremists or even in the hands of a country itself hiding behind religion to justify war. You can tell me that’s a crazy prediction, but it’s happened before.

Bottom line, I see that religion helps people and there are those who find joy and a peaceful life in their religion, but I strongly urge you to consider that maybe it’s not so much the religious message that helps, but the fact that we can be apart of one. Having that sense of belonging that one can feel when involved in a church is a sense of belonging that we could extend worldwide if we weren’t limited to the confines of our different religious messages.
Get hip to the fact that whatever you believe in, there is someone somewhere who feels just as strong if not stronger for their beliefs. It’s not a matter of you being right and them being wrong, but more like you’re both right and you’re both wrong. All you have to do is remove religion from the equation to see that.