Aaron and I conclude our conversation on Storytelling, Dichotomies and Complexity with some reflections of character development and archetypes used in stories. Hope you’ve enjoyed this series, and more to come soon! Enjoy!
This post can also be viewed along with other marvelous content at Nineteen Months!
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“O SON OF SPIRIT! Noble have I created thee, yet thou hast abased thyself. Rise then unto that for which thou wast created.”
- Bahá’ú’lláh
As I interact with my human family in this very fascinating world, I am faced with the dilemma that the above quote seems to encapsulate perfectly…that we are all created noble, but have to learn to arise from the abasement that we’ve gotten ourselves into. That abasement comes in all forms from abuse to oppression to negligence and all kinds of hurtful experiences that we may put ourselves and each other through.
So the burning question stands: How do we arise out of this lost sense of nobility? What behaviors, systems and practices are we collectively consenting to or engaging in that keep us from our noble destiny? What are our associations with even the word “noble”? How many names have we called ourselves and each other; how many judgements (more…)
This post concludes this part of the conversation with Colby on finance. It was a fun and informative subject to talk about, and I look forward to learning more about this arena of responsibility. Please send feedback and share thoughts that we can think about as well!
Colby and I continue our conversation on money and various ways to navigate finances. We now get into approaches to banking and other financial institutions…Enjoy!
In a continuation from our last Finance post, Colby talks a little about finding one’s path, and ways that one can approach career and education…Enjoy!
In this short post, Colby and I discuss approaching higher education, and the implications of choices going in…
What would you do differently if you had it to do over? If you’re at the point of transition from high school to college, what’s your sense of purpose for the next few years?
Here, Colby and I have a back and forth about how we look at money(as a means or an end), and explore some possible healthy postures surrounding gaining more wealth and saving where it counts.
To my atheist and agnostic family: God gets mentioned here. It’s not to exclude you or create discomfort…that’s just where we’re coming from on that. There are other valid sources of inspiration to serve one’s fellow man, I know.
Here we have a continuation of “Avoiding Debt”, Part 1 and Part 2, dealing specifically with credit cards. Colby and I explore some of the implications of credit to one’s future…
Continuation from Part 1. Colby goes further into the issue of going into debt and things to consider regarding pursuing higher education and its costs…
Tyree and I get a little more concrete about the concepts from the previous posts: Part 1 and Part 2. What stories do you have regarding these concepts?
“When one is released from the prison of self, that is indeed freedom, for that is the greater prison. When this release takes place, then one cannot be outwardly imprisoned.”
- ‘Abdu’l-Bahá
An element of life that manages to come up countless times in conversations I have is the things on which we place value. Some things are measurable like televisions, video game consoles, household income and the like. Then come the things that are much harder to measure like service, kindness, intelligence, spirit, security love and quality time. Some of these things can be essential to one’s feelings about quality of life; others can feel essential to aspiring to higher standards of behavior and living. I feel that each individual must engage in a meaningful and thorough introspective search in order to identify the needs one has that can determine where value lies.
There are some whose feelings regarding security lie at the base of what they value, and many of the things they feel joy from, connection to, and attraction to have everything to do with how much security comes with the relationships they form and how those relationships (more…)
In this post, Colby and I talk through ways to analyze what we absorb through media, and provide some concrete examples of how we navigate this large task.
Here’s the first in a series of video blog posts that will be interspersed with the text based posts that have been coming in. Enjoy, and tell me what you think!
Feel free, also, to record audio or video to your mobile device and upload it. Post the link in comments, or send them to me and I’ll post them here. I look forward to hearing from you!
Here’s a post that can also be found at Nineteen Months, where I write occasionally:
“…all the present arts and sciences, inventions and discoveries man has brought forth were once mysteries which nature had decreed should remain hidden and latent, but man has taken them out of the plane of the invisible and brought them into the plane of the visible.”
- ‘Abdu’l-Bahá
“…technology is the programming of nature. It is a capturing of phenomena and a harnessing of these to human purposes.”
- W. Brian Author
Smart Phones. Hybrid Cars. Genetically Modified Foods. Social Networking. Blogging. Stem Cell Research. Cloning. Teleportation… why not? As I type away on my iPad and check the weather outside on my Android phone, all while putting some thoughts together on a post on technology, makes me feel like I’m in some sort of “Inception” storyline where I am entirely unsure where the rabbit-hole leads.
I was an old-school hold-out on having a cell phone in the earliest years of this century but faced the unshakeable reality that I needed to engage with the new technologies that emerged to gain an understanding of their usefulness (or lack thereof) and potential application. My questions then were: “What’s the point of texting?” “What is best conveyed in an email or chat and what warrants a phone or face-to-face conversation?” Fast forward a decade, (more…)
