randy, when i told my mom i was typing up this experience she asked me why i had to type it. my first thought was EGO!! i didn't say that though. i didn't know what to say. one of the few times i needed ego to devise a quick answer and it was MIA. she pulled my card and all i had to offer was silence:P after a few seconds of painful exposure time i gave her some half-baked reply. i forget what the reply was, but it doesn't really matter because the point i want to make here is that i wasn't sure how much good -if any at all- would come out of starting a thread around a document that was conceived out of ego. i am glad your last post proved this thread to be productive.

at minimum your post will probably cause me to look into an online writing class. it would be a good way to constructively occupy my time.

thanks:)

I don't apparently know what is going on here. How would this get into a computer if it were not typed? What is the problem? Or do you usually use one of the voice input functions that Microsoft and others supply for use with computers? I would like to know how well they work because if my hands keep getting worse with arthritis, I may eventually not be able to type any more. When I wake up lately, my right hand won't close and it has no strength so I have a personal interest.

I don't see your writing on the board as being particularly bad. If you use something like MS Word, it offers technical suggestions for improvements and I depend on my spellchecker as my fingers get more clumsy, even in the very old version that I have. Classes are probably available as you say. Seems like an excellent career choice to me. Something that you might even learn to enjoy and take pleasure in.

Ted

As long as what you say (or type) is honest. I dont see it as coming from EGO. Because sometimes it is a humbling experience to tell the truth. The truth is not always flattering. And it requires courage to break down the walls (built up for the protection of ego) and reveal our own human frailty, our human imperfections, and our very human tendancy to err. The TRUTH can be an ego deflator.

Also, it may be that we are initially attracted to the superficial "perfect face" or surface beauty of the "perfect body". But it is a persons IMPERFECTIONS that we learn to LOVE the most. It is their quirky imperfections that we miss the most, and fondly remember most, when a loved one is gone. So while it may be a persons perfections that catch our attention, it is their imperfections that make us LOVE them. (just my opinion).

Never be afraid to be imperfect. My good friend the "old hippie guru" used to tell me "Here I am WARTS AND ALL!"

It was a lesson in self acceptance (and a much needed one for me at the time)

Keep telling the truth (as you see it) keep on being who you are. Keep up the writing (you are not nearly as bad at it as you might think. And I hope yu keep us updated as to your progress.

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LOVE is the answer

peace
patrick

maybe I should quit while I am ahead

I would think the last thing you have to worry about is ego, at least in this sense

there is nothing wrong with taking your circumstances and resources and doing something profound with it, and taking pride in that, ...developing your personal dignity, building up your existential infrastructure so that you can some day not drink...and be less and less a burden to your mother, at least psychologically, and move toward a change agent in PMR, possibly a very significant change agent

for myself, my take is that we are trifurcated entities, with physical/R-complex, mental-Ego and spiritual dimensions - and I think this egolessness concept can be taken too far, or beyond our actual quality...to the point that you are afraid to make any splash whatsoever...beyond a certain point it is entropic timidity...perhaps we don't have just the right words to dissect this in english

more importantly, I doubt you have any idea how inspiring, what you have already said, and what you could further say and do, how inspiring that could be to this local population and beyond, and to wake FWAUs up to their feedback loop, and to promote TOEism. This is in the possible future database. Your intent decides whether to try to actualize, or whether it will pass into the unactualized database.

write a book, get on Oprah, get a girlfriend like Hawking, buy your mom a big house, become a big deal - dream big

look very carefully at the mental scripts, possibly negative and self limiting, planted in your mind by your mother and family - not to get angry or judgemental - I am sure your mom is very heroic - just to be aware of influences

sometimes these negative and self limiting scripts, layered on top of an inherently talented FWAU, creates a destructive tension that leads to the initial downward spiral of vice...like a firmware hardware mismatch

I call this the tragedy of the working class genius

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Does this PMR make my butt look big?

A translator friend recommends Dragon Naturally Speaking, which he has been using for dictation for a decade

You can start with an older version off of eBay for $20...just be careful to check system requirements and compatibility

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dragon-Naturall ... 1272wt_132

The software will also do any commands by voice, so it is used by physically constrained persons with no typing capacity whatsoever to do computer stuff

some patience is required to get the software and your manner of speaking to work together smoothly

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Does this PMR make my butt look big?

ted, i type with a pencil in one hand and my arms don't work that well so it takes me a while to type stuff, but it provides a degree of exercise for me (i am pretty inactive). Dragon Naturally Speaking is an amazing program -because it actually works as well as advertised. i used it a few years ago then my PC crashed and i never reinstalled it. just being lazy, i guess. i will probably reinstall it soon. i bet it would be very helpful for you too. you train the program to recognize your speech as you read aloud the instructions and helpful hints for its use. it takes about 30 minutes, IIRC.

patrick, thank you for your post, i am glad you understand -and helped me to understand- that it did take courage to start this thread. i was worried about being judged. although, to be truthful to myself, i must face the fact that a percentage of my motivation was rooted in ego -ego that wants to shout 'look at me! i'm special! neat stuff happens to me!' it's not easy to say that, but i've become good at recognizing my ego-driven motives, noticing how so much of what i think, say and do is all about 'image' or selfishness. it is a painful burden to look at one's self under the microscope, and it has caused me some depression at times. the good news is it is getting easier. i am making progress in accepting the flaws of myself and others, realizing that we all have our own standards of what we expect from ourselves. we each have our own burdens and i am getting better at accepting that.

randy, i should have said that i don't drink like that anymore. i have 2-3 drinks 3-4 times a month -something i'll improve on, but definitely not the nightmare it used to be.

i have a large family and i've made a lot of friends over the years, all of whom get to hear my theories:) TOEism gets pushed in my room and i see it changing everyone involved! you would be impressed:)

i want everyone who posted in this thread to know that i appreciate your empathy, concern and kindness. it represents precisely what i learned in my experience:D

james

James,

don't be so hard on yourself. Let's say, that it was your ego's intent to write this post. It turned out to be a humbling experience.

Some of us need to learn to believe in ourselves, and it could be as difficult, as to low one's entropy. You are definitely special, if you have courage to say about yourself things, that you have written here.

Lena

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'Real knowledge is to know the extent of ones ignorance.' Confucius.

Yeah

One thing I took from my initial forum interaction with Tom is that you form the best intent you can muster, then you just put it out there, don't over think the details

Good intent, even if badly executed, appears to call forth assistance from NPMR helpers who see the good intent, and they correct the actual results, but this may be superstition on my part

No action is pure, as we remain animal and ego, and fear of animal or ego motives polluting our intent leads to inertia, and inertia must be one of the worst things we can do with the opportunity of the days we have left in this specific meat suit

as far as the technical aspect of the writing...maybe start with capitalisations and limit paragraphs to five lines, and then reload your Dragon software...other than that, very little to comment on

the stuff you are holding back was sexual, right?

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Does this PMR make my butt look big?

Thanks for the mention of Dragon Naturally Speaking. I have a friend who is wheelchair bound as a result of a stroke. He has very limited use of his hands, but has an active mind - he employs me as an independent HVAC contractor, for example.

He is somewhat interested in getting online and DNS would be a required tool in his case.

As he has lots on his plate and I'm unsure what may come of this interest, if anything but I'm comforted to know of something that may provide value to his online experience.

quoted from further remarks from my translator friend

"DNS versions 8, 9, and 10 work just fine.

The improvements from one version to the next are incremental -- and in some cases DNS is adding new features that someone may not really want to use. For example, one newer feature enables the user to dictate text to a recording device, and then have the recording transcribed by the computer. It's good for people on the move, I suppose -- such as a surgeon dictating notes to a microphone headset while he/she is working in an operating room. That certainly isn't the way I would want to work because I need to review and re-edit text continually, and refer back to it to ensure consistency in the translation.

DNS comes in a variety of flavours. In older versions, they used to be called Essentials, Standard, Preferred, and Professional. Starting with version 11, they've been simplified slightly under the names Home, Premium, and Professional (with Legal Professional and Medical Professional sub-flavours).

I would always recommend the Preferred or Premium flavour. The main benefit it offers is that it can play back your own voice. So if in some previous sentence you notice something nonsensical on screen, but can't remember what you intended to dictate, you can listen to the playback to hear exactly what you said. The lesser flavours (Essentials, Standard, and Home) don't have that feature.

I have to caution that DNS isn't ideal for everyone. Translators who are already accustomed to dictating and comfortable doing their own typing will take to DNS very quickly. Others, who knows? It's hard to predict.

Some off-the-shelf DNS boxes include a headset combining an earpiece and a microphone. I always use a much better one of my own, an earmuff style stereo headset with a more robust microphone (price: about $40.00).

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Does this PMR make my butt look big?

if he has some particularly challenging HVAC problems, you could maybe hook him up with Dr. Ted who is an HVAC engineering savant

by the way, this is something Mormons are good at, they use their spiritual affiliation for professional/entrepreneurial networking

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Does this PMR make my butt look big?

lena, you and bette always have something nice to say. thanks for that:)

RBM, if your friend plans on operating a PC i would suggest this mouse:
http://www.buy.com/pr/product.aspx?sku= ... d=34686737
for me, it is the easiest to use and he can allocate functions to the buttons of his choice. the double-click function (for dragging and highlighting) was not compatible with windows 7 when i last looked a few years ago, but they might have updated the s/w by now. if not, there is a feature in windows mouse where he can set the double-click to activate when he holds down the left-click for a few quick moments.



nah. i thought i died. i assumed i was supposed to be released from this VR but nothing was happening so i thought i might have died and was an earth-bound ghost. i even asked my mom if i was dead, in a half-chuckle she said 'no'. i know it sounds zany, but it is a bit discombobulating when the universe tips her hand to you. (sorry about all the card-playing metaphors, they just seem to work well.)

i have had the sexual excitations while trying to induce an OBE:
http://thegodlight.proboards.com/index. ... ge=1#15879

Interesting. There are a variety of ASCs(Dr. Charles Tart's term = Altered States of Conscious) as well as d-ASCs, ('discrete' ASCs... here the term discrete means that the content is not normally transferable to other SC ... so that when one moves from one SC to another, there is a loss of memory, which is regained on re-entering the particular SC), but two features that seem common to many, though not all are 1) a sense that the new reality that they seem to introduce one to is entirely independent of one's own view of it, much like this one (reality) seems to be and 2) A direct perception that customary human constructions and behaviors are unreckonably lunatic (an opinion shared by most animals and aboriginies as well as most 'spirits' that have never been human. A classic, (seems like I've read of or otherwise bumped into it in all sorts of nooks and crannies) is a direct perception that humans are trapped in a trance, 'encapsulated', robotic, spiritless, unconscious. Sometimes a spirit of some sort, finding itself able to communicate with a human, will try to warn the human of this fate. To the utter stupefaction of the would-be herald, the human almost inevitably replies (when he gets it at all), something along the lines of "... and when is this supposed to occur...?" We just SOOOOO don't get it. "It's all fake!" is very much a perception of this kind. Learning to incorporate it (these freshened perceptions) into one's own perceptual policy, while at the same time, avoiding appearing on the street corner in colored or tiedyed bedsheets singing mantras and what not, is just another skill set along the way.

'Ego'. ...Mehn~ .....remember, ego is a modeling system about the self, and like many a map, we can easily come to see it as more real than the territory we mean to use it to understand..... and that is where all the problem comes in. Especially in today's whip-ding world it is almost impossible to keep the process from irrupting as it nearly always does, and, I do declare, not one in a hundred people have a clucking foo just how insidious the whole business is. Hand-wringing vexation is no solution either, and what's worse, does nothing to ameliorate the problem. What seems to be the best solution, for the most part, is to try to recognize it the process in motion when it is occurring, and just kind of go to yourself "Oh... yeah.... hmm... so okay, a bit of a course correction here...." and move on.

MEANWHILE, it can easily be the case that some repressed features of your being very much need to get out into the air, to get expressed and acknowledged, (and thus grow, experience, differentiate and mature, in their own right) and sometimes we try to dampen those back thinking that because they have to do with a need for self expression, that it is somehow selfish or ego-y, (and often, because of lack of air-time, so to speak, they are somewhat undeveloped and present as somewhat infantile in style) and this is entirely unfair to the self (or portions thereof). It is exactly the same mistake to make as that of a community ruler that allows some types of groups ( say religions or card clubs or martial arts groups) but represses others, generally because they are exotic, or strange, rather than anti-social or disruptive (though the repression can lead them to starting to behave anti-socially and disruptively).

Sorry, myself, for the preachy tone and the complex sentences (they take their shape from the way the thought unwinds as I try to write it... I myself don't care to read my own writing. :-D ) ... but, ....Mehn~ .....no hand wringing over it either.

-Montana

Pondini, thanks for that mouse suggestion. I'll keep it in mind if things develop.