Solar Spot Light Hack

The need for efficient light becomes ever so obvious in winter when the sun sets at 4 pm. It is not simply practical but psychological. So I devised a simply, efficient and useful re tooling of a fairly easily found product.  This is a Westinghouse 3x brighter spot light. I carefully took it apart and hooked it up with low voltage speaker wire. Running it through a regular light switch and then onto the window for the panel.

 

 I have installed two together to provide a good level of light. Sufficient for playing board games and cards.

I ran a separate switches for each light so as not to burn out any Led's. Sticking with the initial set up of the electrical designers is a good way to avoid  any problems if you do not have in depth knowledge of circuitry and such.

 This has worked well for years. The batteries have run for well over six years.

   

Living Off-grid

I left the grid six months ago and never want to go back. I did not replace my energy consumption with an expensive solar array. I do have two 30 watt panels, using them to charge a single car battery which is mainly used for Ipod, cell phone, kobo(e-reader) and a portable dvd player. In fact I have little purpose for the mass use of electricity. Having rewired a few solar spot lights for inside lighting and use an oil lamp in each room and some double AA's in the radio I am fully satisfied. It's funny how we spend so much time and energy on entertaining ourselves. Refrigeration is the most practical use we actually have for electricity and I have thought long and hard about it. But with it being winter here in Canada I can't be bothered ( -14 Celsius right now). But even warmer weather as I experienced in early fall I found refrigeration unnecessary. Other than dairy and meat most things in your fridge do not require refrigeration. Sure things do go bad, but a careful and thought out larder will have little waste. Our ancestors got by just fine. We are simply accustomed to many luxuries. When visiting Finnish Lapland I stayed in a cabin which only had a small concrete lined hole in the ground with a lid (of course) to keep perishables. It has its limitations but so does anything. The raw milk we got from a local farm kept quite well.
Being Canada and the winters are cold wood must be cut for the wood stove. Since I came in the fall I had little time to stock reserves but have the great fortune to have numerous "standing dead wood" maples on my land and enjoy and relish in harvesting them for heat. I promise you that warmth is happiness.
I am more than lucky to have a bubbling spring a mile up the road. It's waters are amazing and I honestly have never drank anything to match it. Even in winter green plants grown in its flowing stream and in summer it will freeze you to the bone.

Solace in the wind

When all turns to dust and slips between our fingers,
Relax.
Anything else is futile and works against us.
Glide gently to the forest floor as a leaf in autumn.
The process of life cannot be avoided,
You either accept it or
Live in denial and suffer for it.
Flow with the energy of the Universe.
Exist with joy and love
No matter how difficult that may be.
Then be what you are.
Here and now!

Falsity of media

Modern stimulus is very exciting. It fills our needs for identity, validity and forms our reality. Yet it is false. It is a mirage of the world. Cleaned and filter, made to be comfortably palatable and pleasant to our varying desires. Worse of all it is formulated and crafted to accommodate not the watcher but rather the needs of its patron. Which makes sense in regards to most things commissioned by a client. Unfortunately what media does to the human mind, that is what it accesses and programs is not a haphazard thing but the nexus of our reality, what we believe. Not something to be sold to the highest bidder.
Reality cannot be found in a television, magazine, internet or book. It is when we sit absorbing the world around us via our own interpretation and experience of life that reality will reveal itself. Watching a tree is far more edifying. The ants, butterflies, dragon flies that live in and around it. The leaves, birds and squirrels that call it home. Observing such true stimulus is not only enriching but beautiful. Perhaps we as a species need to turn off the false reality and get out there and discover our world before we lose the ability to experience it anymore.

The program

When anger rules you are not in control. How can clarity be found in the fumes and geyser of negative passions? Where is serenity when there is nothing but agitation? Negative emotions must be thwarted . Until then we are lost in a turmoil of self deprecation and open to fear and hate through which we are easily manipulated and made to believe all nature of nonsense. Charity starts at home and that means being positive with ones self and ones tribe. Not self indulgent and selfish. Rather to be compassionate and considerate is the greatest conditioning you may impart amoung those around you and yourself. Kindness for its own sake is its own reward. This is the cleansing that washes away negativity. This is the program that begins the freedom from control.
We are saturated by advertising. Our minds are filled with so much nonsense that it is often difficult for people to know right from wrong. Our western nations are now the dark empire, yet we sit thinking how great we are. We impoverish the world so as to keep oil prices and food prices down in our nations. While the world is in revolt because they can barely afford to feed their families. We fill the pockets of third world dictators for compliance in taking everything they have of value while their people starve. Yet we sit justified believing in just deserts. Which is only a cruel polite fashion of saying "To the victor belong the spoils." William L. Marcy
"Through the skillful use of propaganda, whole peoples can be persuaded that Heaven is Hell, and vice versa."Adolf Hitler
So here we are with wool over our eyes. While we plunder the planet our mother and only possible home. I think the most adequate and vulgar saying fits, "we shit the bed". Yet it does not seem to phase us as we continue to pollute and destroy in the name of our own self interest. A civilization of energy junkies that won't quit till we are cold and dead. All due to programming and the corporations know this quite well. It reminds me of the movie Inception. Where Leonardo DeCaprio's character plants an idea in a another characters mind. But the idea takes over. It over rides all nature of practicality and common sense until that character believes she must kill herself to wake up from a dream which is actually reality. The idea that we need more and should never stop accumulating more was able to take advantage of our pack rat instincts. I watch people in perfectly nice cloths buy more. People fill fridges which are already full just to throw away last weeks rotten food. We are in such a dream state that the obvious can not be seen. The program has gone horribly wrong. Yet considering that corporations are immortal vampire creatures which are stuck in their own predatory program it is no wonder. Any being which does not die and has an outlook of the infinite could not possibly understand the finite as those who are limited by it. It is no wonder that their insatiable mind set is destroying the earth. There are no living creatures such as this. All predators have the limitation of a full stomach. But a corporation has all parts interchangeable, replaceable as needs arise and an appetite which is only limited by the expanse of their Administrative greed.
The only individual defense is the grass roots partisan kind. Reclaim one mind at a time and the only person who can save us is our self. Reprogram. Your currency spending is your vote for a corporation or small business. Anything bought second hand is a bypass of the industrial manufacturing process. Such products need not be made anew if they already exist. Energy is not an entitlement and should not be treated as such. Live as if you were in the Great Depression because we are.

The focus of our reality

It just confounds me how folks don't know that they are creating their world with their thoughts and actions. We spend all our lives interpreting reality via our own minds. Yet we so rarely make that jump to realizing it is us who formulates what we believe. For the most part we are and have been programmed since birth . But it is our mind which implements these programs to create our perspective. We are who we were told we were as children. Our basis for identity starts with the name provided to us by parents then their behavior gets copied via imitation. Of course we have a combo of their genetics as well. But the creation of identity is ego based especially among adolescents. We make ourselves from that point on. It is instinctual. The need to spread our wings and fly on our own terms.

If and when we truly realize this we can really start living with our eyes open. At this point behavior becomes so important not just so as to follow the rules but more importantly for the sake of what following moral rules does to us and those around us. Kindness is not something to do because of a fear of being placed on Santa's naughty list but rather a miraculous gateway to living in a heavenly paradise here on earth. When enacted it acts as a contagious agents. Simple yes, hard to do, well only if you like living in hellish conditions. Stress, anger, all nature of malevolence can be crushed by kindness. Sounds hokey, well yes it does but that doesn't stop it from being true. The problem we are all faced with are patterns of negative behavior we have experienced and absorbed. As Darth Vader goes on about all the time. the darkside is powerful and that it sure is. It infuses the ego and encourages it to gorge itself on negativity. That's what bullying has always been about. But there are two side to that story. The addiction to negativity is taught by exposure to it. Especially at an early age. Without experiencing love, negativity takes its place. Then how can we expect those poor folks to know anything else. The bully in the school yard is usually suffering from low self esteem and no sense of positive identity, most likely no positive role model to provide one. When left to their own devices all creatures do what they can to survive and that most certainly includes emotional survival not just physical.

One of the most over looked aspect of kindness is being kind to oneself. Most folks may not realize how horrid they are to themselves. We usually punish ourselves psychologically as we were punished as children or by someone who had an effect on us . That program is old and deeply set in our psyche. That's why we usually use similar methods with our kids as our parents did with us. But what we do to others we most likely do to our selves. "Judge not lest ye be judged" has always popped out at me as a key statement to this. Since we only know what's going on in our minds the judgment of others can only affect us via our own perception. Considering we can't know the thoughts of others we usually just make them up according to our own insecurities and fears. Just as a dream sequence in a movie when a character informs the dreamer that they too are a part of the dreamers mind. Just some reflection of themselves in a different persona. Everything we commiserate about is how we have chosen to view our reality via old habits. Which most usually makes us feel just like we've been conditioned to feel, as our selves. But that too is a program. Which by the way is not set in stone.


Unless we find the path to kindness we can rarely find peace. Unfortunately contemporary western society seems to believe that money making is the path to happiness. Now we all need a certain amount of it in this world but it is most certainly not the path to happiness. Fact is greed is a never ending opiate and usually destroys our lives, AKA relationships (the only important things we have). All religions and philosophies tell us this. Being kind and good leads quite simply to living a happier and more joyful life. Is it hard? Well yes of course. But once the program is believed (accepted) and hypocrisy rooted out and vanity vanquished (meaning the behavior is changing) it will lead to a calmer more relaxed existence.

Cyborgs and social networking

We are now in a matrix entirely manufactured to gather data so as to maximize the efficiency of being programmed. As a whole humanity is not grasping the insidious nature of all this info being gathered on us individually. This may be the information age but as usual we only absorb the superficial nature of such a catch phrase. Just as people believed mechanization would free them from labour. We experience just the tip of the iceberg in regards to how this age of information really works. Our ego centric world view hides the motives of those who are orchestrating these juggernauts of power. These techniques of finding out everything about us are the precursor to an absolute Orwellian future. Just as robotics has maximized profits for employers and left us without jobs the outstanding abilities that computers have proved to have in calculation in turn has fooled us again. We are trained to love our captivity, admire and adore our chains. Specialization (seen as an amazing adaptation) has debased us to idiocy. Our ancestors would shake their heads in disgust. We are becoming less able to think or do or worse yet refuse to think or do basic things that make life possible and enjoyable. We have been programmed with the idea of wanting the sort of life enjoyed by the aristocracy of old. Basically a life of leisure. The real problem with this is that with no purpose their is no sense of actual meaningful contentedness to be achieved. Thus unhappiness abounds. Big pharma will now sell you something to fix that. In the past we were to busy living our lives. By promoting irresponsible introversion ( as advertising does) without benevolent and positive reinforcement as was the practice of all ancient systems of introversion. Meditation, Yoga and the like always had a teacher or Guru who helped you along. Guiding you to development rather than the pit of agony that people are driven into by advertising. Other than food and warm dry shelter we have little need of much more materialistically. Of course we are a tool user and require a fair amount of them. But our ancestors knew how to produce them. We have been programmed to see that knowledge as primitive and below us. The real thing we need is people. We have been isolated and divided from each other. In the past we were brought together by necessity but now we are emotionally hobbled in our separated realities. What used to make us strong were our communities. The world wide web is helping in certain international issues (and important issues they are). Democracy and other people based movements will thrive from the availability of over seas connections. But at the more local individual level people are being torn a part. Adolescents used to get lonely and congregate. Now they text each other and forgo the arduous task of socialization. One can only imagine the future devastation of our social fabric. The western nations are now populated by highly trained cyborgs. Absolutely in love with their inter communication devices and gadgets. Dumb monkey.