The Advantages of White Privilege

Wisdom lost through the ages, common sense is no longer common.

Written by Gary Wonning

Today, in many circles it is thought that because a person’s skin is white, they have lead an easier life and not been exposed to some of the hardships many have seen, only because they are white.

There are many, many whites who have lead lives just as tumultuous as any other particular element of society. To discover the truth in this, one just needs to look around at all the various lives people of all colors lead and not just look at the stereotypical person

While stereotypically, there may be some truth to this, I believe that each particular race, ethnicity, religion and genders have certain advantages to their particular station in life.

There are definitely certain advantages to being male or female,  despite what many think, in the end they balance out. If one realistically looks into this, with an open mind, they will discover this is true.

I believe the advantage to being white, especially a white male, is that white males have no one else to blame their misfortunes and shortcomings on.

Every other sector  of society has an excuse for failing. For many it is always someone else’s fault, a reason, however unfounded , can always be found to rationalize their shortcomings or lack of desire. They can blame it on their gender, their race, religion, or various other factors, and not face up to their own personal responsibility in resolving the matter.  It is always easier to blame someone else.

We come into this life choosing our station in life and a general path we will follow, it is called free will. We subconsciously choose the so-called hardships we will face in order for our soul to evolve. Once we understand the hardships we chose, we can then decide to change our life for the better.

Without taking personal responsibility for our life by blaming others, our lives will never get better. We can’t depend on others to give us a better life.

It is up to us, individually, and us alone; sure we may attract people into our life to help with this, but it is our responsibility to bring those individuals and opportunities to the forefront. Until we are ready to learn and grow, no one can help us.

To me, white privilege speeds this process along. Being white, especially a male ensures that we have no excuses, we have no one to blame, it is for us to do. There are no excuses.

Can you see a white male blaming a woman or someone of a different color for our shortcomings and getting any sympathy?

It ain’t gonna happen. And it shouldn’t.  This is our white privilege, because we have no excuses, other than ourself, we are compelled to take action and stand up for ourselves.

That is a privilege, it enables us to have the opportunity to improve our lives.

We are each responsible for our actions and our lot in life, if  your lot in life isn’t what you would like, get up off your duff and change it.

Especially in the United States, we have free will and freedom, we are free to chose our destiny, based on desire and ability.

Gary has been a writer/photographer for over thirty years. Specializing in nature and landscape photography, while studying native cultures.

His travels have taken him to most of the United States, as well as Australia, Belize, Egypt and the Canary Islands.

He has studied the Mayan culture of Central America and the aborigines of

Australia. Photography has given him the opportunity to observe life in various parts of the world.

He has observed that many of the forgotten cultures had spiritual beliefs that were stronger than ours in modern times.

In technology, we have made advances far superior to those that came before us, but, we have lagged behind in gaining or maintaining our spiritual knowledge.

For us to advance as the human race, we need to combine the spiritual knowledge of those that came before us, not only that of the ancients but the knowledge of our direct ancestors as well, with the technical knowledge we have today for us to propel into the twenty-first century and beyond.

He has published several books about his adventures, and is available for book signings, and speaking engagements.

For more information, please consult his website,www.journeysthrulife.com.

 

 

 

Are You Being Bullied?

Wisdom lost through the ages, common sense is no longer common.

Written by Gary Wonning

According to the present day definition, I tend to believe everyone on the planet has been bullied at some point in their life.

It happened to me when I was a little bitty squirt. 

In today’s world, some think that if another disagrees with you it’s bullying, or if they try to get you to actually do your job. 

Kids as well as adults can be pretty mean and uncaring at times. That is just a part of life.

Like it or not , we are all human beings and being such we are part of the animal kingdom, and all animals have a pecking order, it has always been this way and will always be this way.

Nothing is going to change that. There are times as a final act, after all forms of diplomacy is tried that physical acts are necessary. Bullies are cowards, Most often if one stands up to them , they will back off and go pick on someone else. 

If you are being bullied with just words, it’s no big deal. 

It’s just a matter of having enough self esteem and confidence in yourself to know that what they are saying isn’t true. When you have that self confidence, the words will bounce off you like water off a duck’s back and mean nothing. 

Maybe the reason someone is picking on you is so you will finally “get it” and realize you are not what they say you are, and you are above that kind of thing and you finally begin to stand up for yourself.

Many times the one being “bullied” likes the drama and popularity that comes with it, being a victim has become very popular these days, it can draw a lot of attention to someone, and it also shifts the blame for your short comings to someone else, it is their fault. 

In this day and age, anyone can succeed if they have the desire and ability, it isn’t based on race, gender, creed or national origin, to think differently is just placing blame for your actions on someone else.

Once you build some self confidence and rise above that, the bullying will stop. 

In the journey of life, people can and will help you, but in the end, it is your responsibility to solve your own problems, no one can do that for you. 

As long as you belief you are a victim, life will treat you like a victim. 

You are in control of your life, it is your decision to lead it as you desire, and not succumb to negative forces around you. 

It’s all about you, not them.

There are billions of people in this world, you don’t need those kind in your life. Learn the lessons they are teaching you, and move on. 

Gary has been a writer/photographer for over thirty years. Specializing in nature and landscape photography, while studying native cultures.

His travels have taken him to most of the United States, as well as Australia, Belize, Egypt and the Canary Islands.

He has studied the Mayan culture of Central America and the aborigines of

Australia. Photography has given him the opportunity to observe life in various parts of the world.

He has observed that many of the forgotten cultures had spiritual beliefs that were stronger than ours in modern times.

In technology, we have made advances far superior to those that came before us, but, we have lagged behind in gaining or maintaining our spiritual knowledge.

For us to advance as the human race, we need to combine the spiritual knowledge of those that came before us, not only that of the ancients but the knowledge of our direct ancestors as well, with the technical knowledge we have today for us to propel into the twenty-first century and beyond.

He has published several books about his adventures.

For more information, please consult his website,www.journeysthrulife.com.

The Life of a UPS Driver: A Snowy Day

 

Written by Gary Wonning

The day began like many others, a chill in the air and a chance of snow. Soon after arriving in Vevay, the snow really began to come down and before I knew it, there was nearly a foot of the white stuff on the ground.

Knowing the roads would be a lot worse  in the high country, I soon became concerned I may not be able to get home. Occasionally, drivers had not been able to get back until after midnight on such days. On one such day, Don drove back to Osgood after midnight with no windshield. He  slid off the road and a tree limb struck the windshield, breaking it.

As I left Vevay and drove through Markland, it was getting worse by the minute. This road isn’t traveled much on a good day and there hadn’t been anyone through here for a while. Over a foot of snow covered the road and I had no idea where the edge of the road was. A tractor trailer was coming right at me and he didn’t know where the road was either. As he approached me, the right side of his trailer dropped off the road and it began to jack knife.

This isn’t going to be pretty. Determining how and where I was going to get out of his way, he suddenly got his truck straightened out, just in time. We missed by inches.

It became obvious I wasn’t going to be able to finish my day; the trick now was to just get home. I’m not sure how that is going to happen, eventually, I need to go up a hill but that will be difficult, I can hardly maintain any speed on flat ground.

The adventures and misadventures of a UPS driver.

A UPS driver making a delivery to a beautiful blonde

Gary has been a writer/photographer for over thirty years. Specializing in nature and landscape photography, as well as studying native cultures.

His travels have taken him to most of the United States, as well as Australia, Belize, Egypt and the Canary Islands.

He has studied the Mayan culture of Central America as well as the aborigines of Australia. Photography has given him the opportunity to observe life in various parts of the world.

He has published several books about his adventures.

For more information, please consult his website,www.journeysthrulife.com.

Your comments are welcome

UPS Arizona style

A UPS driver making a delivery to a beautiful blonde

Written by Gary Wonning

I was about to see another side of UPS. My aunt and uncle lived in Phoenix Arizona so I decided to go visit them in February of nineteen eighty-eight. My uncle had been confined to assisted living, so it was just my aunt and myself gallivanting around the desert.

One afternoon, a few miles northwest of Phoenix, we entered the little town of Wickenburg, at the edge of town was a small gas station. I happened to look over in the parking lot and there were four P-400 UPS package cars parked at a small roller conveyor with a roof built over it.

I had to check this out; I turned around and inquired at the station.  The attendant told me that yes it was a UPS center, there were only four drivers, each would deliver a quarter of the seven hundred population town and head out into the desert, going a different direction, serving mainly Indian reservations. There was a goose neck trailer in the back with a window air conditioner sticking out the side. This was the office, a manager would drive up from Phoenix in the morning, get things started and then drive back to Phoenix for the rest of the day.

After moving to Sedona a few years later, I was to discover this was common in the desert, with a climate that featured no extreme cold, very little rain, and a sparse population, only the essentials were needed.

In Camp Verde located in the Verde River Valley, they used what looked like a manufactured home with docks in the side as a center. The package cars were parked outside in the weather, of course the loading was done in the early morning hours before the heat of the day had set in.

Arizona also had state wide seniority whereby a driver could bid on an area statewide, I think the areas came up for bid every two years and if he/she had enough seniority could bid on any area in the state.  A lot of times drivers in Phoenix would do this to escape the heat of the low desert and to get away from the stressful city life.

Because of the distance Arizona was from Louisville and the three time zones involved, next day air parcels had to leave Sedona by two-thirty pm in order to arrive in Phoenix in time to make the plane to the main air hub in Louisville.

Growing up on a dairy farm in southeastern Indiana, Gary traveled very little until midlife, when the opportunity became available to him.

Grabbing his camera and a bag full of equipment, he began his vision quest traveling to most areas of the United States and several countries abroad.

Along the way he collected several thousand photographs that he wants to share with everyone.

http://www.travelnsnap.com

Gary decided the best way to accomplish his goal was to publish photo documentaries on the various areas of the world he has visited.

What will follow will be several photography books, who knows how many will wind up in his collection.

To contact Gary:

journeysthrulife@gmail.com.

http://www.journeysthrulife.com.

Twin Flames: Are They For Real?

A journey into the unknown. Open new avenues in your spiritual journey

Written by Gary Wonning

There has been much discussion about Twin Flames, who they are, and even if they exist.

Even today, there are many who believe there is no such thing as a twin flame, or twin soul.

As we become more spiritually in tune, more and more information is revealed to us from our higher source and as a result our learning continues.

Among most people, there has been little doubt that on some level they do exist, eventually, you can’t ignore the feelings of your soul.

We can only learn higher knowledge as we advance up the ladder of learning, slowly, taking each step as it comes, advancing along life’s path. 

We eventually learn, and it becomes part of our belief system that  are all souls  have a body, we are not bodies that have a soul. The real us never dies, we are immortal. It is only the physical body that dies and remains on earth, leaving behind memories of who we were in that particular incarnation.

After exiting the physical body, the soul and spirit live on as energy.

As we know, energy cannot be destroyed, once it is  created, it can only change shape and or form.

The soul is capable of dividing into different entities if it so chooses and once it has advanced spiritually.

The Tree of Life

To the question as to whether there are twin flames, I like the following analogy.

The best way to maybe explain a soul is to compare it to a clump of grapes, with a soul being the clump of grapes. 

Then you compare each lifetime to an individual grape. When a soul, or a portion of the soul reincarnates, it breaks free from the clump, travels to earth or elsewhere, does it’s thing, learns the lessons it was sent to learn and then returns to the clump, and relates to the others what it has experienced, much like we do on the physical level when we return from a vacation.

Being a part of the clump, the individual spirit or energy remembers being united with the group soul, and begins looking for other aspects of it’s being so it can once again reunite with itself, so to speak. 

Thus, the concept of twin souls is created. This searching creates much conflict on planet earth and can lead to discord in relationships.

We often look at the concept as there only being one twin flame, in reality, there can be as many as the soul determines it wants to have inhabiting physical life at one particular time.

 All the lives of a spirit can be accessed by the incarnated soul,  which explains why sometimes multiple people access the same lives when under regression. 

When different spirits of the same soul incarnate, they each benefit from what the other aspect encounters and learns. That is the reason one soul may have several “parts” in physical life at one time. 

Since all time is happening simultaneously, all souls are omnipresent, they can be anywhere and everywhere at once. That is why we can speak to our departed friends and family, even though they are off in another lifetime somewhere, part of them still exist in the spirit world and are  thereby accessible to us.

Incarnating into multiple, concurrent lives, a soul could evolve much faster by gathering more experience and positive energy. 

A soul incarnated into multiple persons could fulfill very complex plans to help humanity’s spiritual evolution. On a personal level, we often pick our life partners on the basis of what our life plan is, when we pick the wrong partner for the wrong reasons, it messes up our whole life plan and things can never be right until we find the right partner. 

In the case of twin flames, the idea that hurting others means hurting yourself is literally true. 

Gary has been a writer/photographer for over thirty years. Specializing in nature and landscape photography, as well as studying native cultures.

His travels have taken him to most of the United States, as well as Australia, Belize, Egypt and the Canary Islands.

He has studied the Mayan culture of Central America as well as the aborigines of Australia. Photography has given him the opportunity to observe life in various parts of the world.

He has published several books about his adventures.

For more information, please consult his website,www.journeysthrulife.com.

Your comments are welcome

 

The Tree of Life, and the Tree of Knowledge

Many don’t realize there were two trees in the Garden of Eden, The Tree of Life, and the Tree of Knowledge.

 

Gary has been a writer/photographer for over thirty years. Specializing in nature and landscape photography, as well as studying native cultures.
His travels have taken him to most of the United States, as well as Australia, Belize, Egypt and the Canary Islands.
He has studied the Mayan culture of Central America as well as the aborigines of Australia. Photography has given him the opportunity to observe life in various parts of the world.
He has published several books about his adventures.
For more information, please consult his website,www.journeysthrulife.com.
Your comments are welcome

a personal spiritual journey

Noah Had the Right Idea

 

Noah had it right

With all the discord in the world and knowing most people don’t listen and ultimately do their own thing, I have come to the conclusion that Noah had it right all along. 

People weren’t listening to him and they were doing whatever they pleased so Noah saw the handwriting on the wall, he got on a boat and left. 

Not his problem, not his circus. He created his own circus.

Wisdom lost through the ages, common sense is no longer common.

Gary has been a writer/photographer for over thirty years. Specializing in nature and landscape photography, as well as studying native cultures.

His travels have taken him to most of the United States, as well as Australia, Belize, Egypt and the Canary Islands.

He has studied the Mayan culture of Central America as well as the aborigines of Australia. Photography has given him the opportunity to observe life in various parts of the world.

He has published several books about his adventures.

For more information, please consult his website,www.journeysthrulife.com.

Your comments are welcome

It Pays to Not Be Bored

 

Written by: Gary Wonning

An excerpt from my book, “Those Were The Days.”

Life was a lot slower and simpler in the fifties and sixties.

I soon learned that if I hung around the house, mom would find something for me to do, and it was normally something I didn’t want to do, so it was best to stay outside and play. I liked to aggravate her, but I soon found out that telling her I was bored wasn’t in my best interests.

Autumn foliage

Gary has been a writer/photographer for over thirty years. Specializing in nature and landscape photography, as well as studying native cultures.

His travels have taken him to most of the United States, as well as Australia, Belize, Egypt and the Canary Islands.

He has studied the Mayan culture of Central America as well as the aborigines of Australia. Photography has given him the opportunity to observe life in various parts of the world.

He has published several books about his adventures.

For more information, please consult his website,www.journeysthrulife.com.

Your comments are welcome

Life On The Farm

Written By: Gary Wonning

An excerpt from my book, Those Were the Days My Friend.

Life was a lot slower and simpler in the fifties and sixties.

It was a good life, growing up on a farm, I often felt sorry for my cousins who lived in Indianapolis. Financially they were better off than we were, but I had animals to be around, could go fishing anytime I wanted, a creek to play in and mom and dad pretty much let me roam anywhere I wanted on the farm.

Gary has been a writer/photographer for over thirty years. Specializing in nature and landscape photography, as well as studying native cultures.

His travels have taken him to most of the United States, as well as Australia, Belize, Egypt and the Canary Islands.

He has studied the Mayan culture of Central America as well as the aborigines of Australia. Photography has given him the opportunity to observe life in various parts of the world.

He has published several books about his adventures.

For more information, please consult his website,www.journeysthrulife.com.

Your comments are welcome

Midwestern scenic

Thoughts on Reincarnation

A New World is Revolving

Interesting thoughts, part of which I borrowed from someone else.

According to a Pleiadian interpretation of life, Jesus taught reincarnation and not resurrection.

Human beings evolve by living life over and over again on the material plane in order to gain knowledge from their life lessons.

The primary goal of reincarnation is to evolve into beings of higher consciousness or beings of a higher vibration and love.  The message is that we are being called to the next phase of our evolution as beings here on planet Earth.

However, human beings always reincarnate as people, never as animals as in the Hindu cosmology since animals do not evolve spiritually as humans do.

Animals are part of the overall evolution of nature itself. Another fact to consider is the word evolution has two meanings. The first meaning is that a development and unfolding of what already exists, but is hidden. This means that something has to rise from the unconscious to the conscious. The second meaning is that something that does not yet exist is created, developed, and explored.

It is a consensus by biblical scholars today that reincarnation was part of early Jewish thought.

Hasidic Jews got their ideas about reincarnation from medieval Jewish mystics, known as Kabbalists.

Hasidism is a form of Judaism that was founded in the 18th century in Poland by Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov (ca. 1700– 1760).  He took elements of Kabbalistic teaching and made it accessible to the common people in a movement that spread across Eastern Europe as a result reincarnation is a fundamental Hasidic belief.

One Hasidic bedtime prayer asks for forgiveness for “anyone who has angered or vexed me… in this incarnation or any other.”  Both Kabbalists and Hasidic Jews tell us that every person has a spark of the divine inside of them and that the destiny of humanity is to liberate that divine spark and unite it with the larger Creation.

These two ideas of reincarnation and union with God, or Creation, have been a part of Judaism since the time of Jesus.

Of course, these teachings had to be suppressed for fear of persecution by the religious hierarchy.  Since the beginning, Mystics have always had a difficult time in any religion.

And so it may stand to reason that at the time of Jesus, mystical and rabbinic Judaism were one and the same. The rabbis who founded traditional Judaism were also mystics. So if Jesus did teach reincarnation and divine union instead of resurrection, as I believe he did, he either absorbed these ideas from the great rabbis of his day and/ or he learned this from his association with Star Visitors.

The author has been a writer/photographer for over thirty years. Specializing in nature and landscape photography, as well as studying native cultures.

His travels have taken him to most of the United States, as well as Australia, Belize, Egypt and the Canary Islands.

He has studied the Mayan culture of Central America as well as the aborigines of Australia. Photography has given him the opportunity to observe life in various parts of the world.

He has published several books about his adventures.

For more information, please consult his website,www.journeysthrulife.com.

Your comments are welcome

a personal spiritual journey