HOME | POLITICS | SPORTS | LIFE | SCI/TECH | OPEDS | HELPFUL TIPS
|
Oct. 3, 2005 To some people the idea of "working in bliss" might seem like an oxymoron. They don't enjoy their work, so they associate bliss with being away from work. From an early age I loved my work, and I worked in bliss. In my youthful energy I amazed people. In furies of joy I raked leaves for my grandmother and made ten cents an hour. I truly was a physical dynamo, brimming over with natural energy. When I went to grade school I loved to learn and I learned in bliss. Sometimes, though, I looked out the window and watched the clouds. First thing in the morning during the chilly months I stood at the iron grate and watched the janitor checking the oil furnace. I liked to watch the bright yellow flames. I was amazingly energized and inspired by the fierce energies of nature. Energy brought me bliss and I had a lot of energy. When I got sick I lost energy and felt very weak and tired. When I lost confidence I lost energy and felt very weak and tired. Consequently I had to learn to get back the bliss I'd felt before those many long years of frustration and sickness. Now Brian Barbeito writes of the Canadian photographer Arnaud Maggs, and how he worked in bliss, and that brings me back to this way I was when I was happiest and most productive. I really liked to work hard and I did my best work when I was working hard. I never understood why people cheat and try to get out of working. Oddly enough, though, I became unemployed in 1968 at age 28 and from them on I mainly worked without being paid to work. I had been working as a high school teacher. Since then I've often worked to help people without being paid. In 1968 I started a math club and the Superintendent said that it was a waste of time, because students would just come to the meetings to avoid study hall. He was extremely cynical and negative. When the math club was a success he found reasons to terminate my employment. It was a small town community where all the Blacks had been run out of town a decade or two before, burned out as they say, and all the teachers went to the same Fundamentalist church. I was sick a lot, and I was not "one of the group." In addition the Superintendent said my college transcript was better than any other teacher's there. Maybe I was just too hard a worker. Anyway, I was terminated and that was that. Some students at the High School there said I was a damm "n...er lover." I discovered "working in bliss" because it was hard for me not to be depressed. I gave myself work to do, and I worked hard. This helped me to recover my early childhood enthusiasm. The famous spiritual teacher Adi Da calls this sense of enthusiasm, and calling, and connectedness "The Bright." Adi Da, too works in bliss. Somehow, by gosh and by golly, we got tuned into the same psychic frequency. The ultimate satisfaction and success is being able to work at something you are good at, and find that some other people value what you do, so that you can support yourself by doing what you are good at. Unfortunately, our society isn't geared to help children grow up and attain so much success. In fact many people work at jobs that bore them or tire them out terribly, so they become very cynical and negative. When I work in bliss I am sitting at a musical keyboard making instrumental pieces or composing songs. These songs delight young children and their caregivers. After all, young children often work in bliss and play in bliss, and the young child who is learning enthusiastically is both working and playing at the same time. The learning child is actively growing. My best songs celebrate and share the happiness living, learning, and growing. The tunes are easy for me to sing and that makes them easy for most anyone else to sing, since I'm not a sophisticated musician. Sophisticated or not, I am a veritable mill of songs. When I'm in bliss I turn out a lot of songs in a day. I sing in joy and joy makes the singing easy. But why was I so happy not being gainfully employed? Many men are terribly depressed when they can't find gainful employment. Well, I really had no choice. I was fortunate. I had the bliss of an idiot... idiot savant that is. The weak spot in my life was finding a sponsor. If I'd found support for my work I would have created lots more songs. What happened was that I did not find the sponsor I needed and my life rather fell apart. Disease and too much hard physical labor caused this to happen. To survive I had to become a psychic healer. I mean, I had to do my innovative research on natural healing and psychic energy. That became my work in bliss. That was a lot less conservative than my music! So it was even harder for me to find a sponsor! I can relate very well to Brian Barbeitos and his article about Arnaud Maggs. I was given a camera at age twelve, and I took a lot of pictures with it until one morning I was riding my bike and it happened to fall onto the street pavement. That was the end of my photography! Being poor, we had no money for another camera or for any lessons in how to treat a camera and use a camera. Besides developing film was very costly. School taught words, not pictures! Lack of money is a pain, and many forms of art require a great deal of money. Writing requires relatively little money. But of course not everyone who has talent in music is talented with words. In my heyday I was composing about forty melodies in two hours and many lyrics took me weeks to finish. Yet I went to school 24 years and no class ever said anything about how to compose melodies. Decades of practice went into my wordy writing. I still need tutoring for wordy writing! But my melodies were a priceless "gift." a true "gift" that society didn't tap into. That problem raised the issue. I sought to understand how a child can be SO "gifted" yet totally fall through the cracks in school and later in society. It boggles my mind. But hey. I've figured it all out. This makes me a good counselor for other similarly bullied and chronically intimidated persons. Not every talented child is talented in the same way and not every autistic savant is gifted in doing memory work. After I'd healed myself in 1980 by psychic shaman's power I ventured boldly into town and I found geniuses that were having difficulty. Each genius did his or her best work while working in bliss like Arnaud Maggs. But each genius was suffering from horrible poverty! This was wrong, Wrong, WRONG! Poverty kept the genius from working at what he or she did best. What a WASTE! Why is one "gifted" person helped, when thousands are not helped? Why was my "talent" considered crazy or worthless? I sought to understand. Working in bliss I traveled around and interacted psychically, shamanistically, and telepathically with a number of unusually "gifted" persons and through my working in bliss I conceived of the idea of a new nonprofit organization FAST= Foundation for the Advancement of Special Talent. I wrote about FAST and I talked about FAST and I found individual persons interested in FAST and I helped a number of people as a FAST worker working in bliss. But alas. FAST never got a sponsor. As long as I enjoy working so much that working brings me bliss, I figure I'm on the winning track, along with Robert Fulton, Robert Goddard, and other proven pioneers whom their contemporaries thought were crazy. I'll keep working for FAST until FAST finds a sponsor. Then I'll be able to help lots more people and compose lots more songs. ------------ About the author: John L. Waters is an amateur psychologist and independent researcher on self-healing, integration, and problem-solving. John has created art, music and songs, prose and poetry, and helped people solve a difficult problem. For more information, read: John's letters of recommendation: http://members.tripod.com/johnlwaters/recommendations about John's self-healing and integration: http://members.tripod.com/johnlwaters/index.html about John's independent research: http://www.humboldt.edu/~jlw47/index.html about John's seeking an agent or a publisher: http://www.writers.net/writers/39295 Email: blueguntwo@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. Please link to this article rather than copying and pasting it onto your site (which would be unauthorized and illegal). |
||||||
|
|
|||||||
|
