The Cult of Fausto

The gifts I mentioned a couple postings ago are literally paying off now. I joined the Cult of Fausto (my nickname) and signed up for the program at cybertradinguniversity.com. Yes it costs a lot and my mom would have a heart attack if she knew how much I paid. I told Austin and he almost had a heart attack! :-) But with day trading, as with any skill, you need to learn from a master of the craft.

I made $842.32 today, my first day of live trading with my new cult. Biotechs were on a tear. I traded AGEN (that was a loss) SVA, CPRX, and SQNM. I would have traded HGSI during the last 10 minutes of the trading day but I maxed out my account and didn't have the wherewithal to switch to one of my other two accounts. duh.

My mom was so excited she hugged me. Lack of results thus far was beginning to get her worried and I was starting to worry that she was going to pressure me into getting a regular day job. Getting a day job would kill the whole point of my new life. I might as well roll over and die rather than do that.

Also today, I got my mom logged into the site where you can check up on your kid's grades. Alex has gotten all 100%'s so far, plus some extra credit. We were very happy and relieved about that. I told Alex he was awesome and he was pleased despite himself. He tried not to show it but he couldn't help it :-)

Better still, my mom decided not to have any more big parties, yay!

The whole house is breathing a sigh of relief with all the good news.

Population Control

Everyone should be required to raise someone else's kids but not their own.

Then, without those most powerful of all evolutionary blinders on, people would see the whole concept more clearly and realize how utterly stupid and insane it is to have kids. They would also realize where they're going wrong with raising the kid, and they would realize where the kid needs help to improve in order to hold down a job, make an honest living, and stay out of jail.

Unfortunately, with many parents, the urge to have kids stops with the kid being born and does not continue with the job of actual parenting. I know most of you can't even imagine being uninterested in raising your child, but unfortunately, I have seen this phenomena at all socioeconomic levels and it's disastrous results. Human life is precious. Bringing a child into the world should not be taken so lightly. My mom says that raising Alex is a full time job for 2 people, namely, my mom and me! HAHA!!!

Some people should be sterilized.

Population control in all countries would go a long way towards solving the global problems we face today.

Having a hard time practicing

Well, the gifts just keep on coming.

Everything seems to be looking up.

So I'm having a hard time practicing.

My practice is where I go to work out my troubles, or at least make peace with them.

So what happens when I don't have any troubles? No practice! I'm very ungrateful. Well, Lama, Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, things are really cool for me now so I no longer need you in my life. Ta ta, I'm off to amuse myself. See ya when life sucks again. That might be any moment now, anyway.

I didn't manage to start my practice this am.

I'm just starting now, but I'm interrupting myself to write this.

I went back to coffee because I was staying up late reading the Harry Potter books. Now that I'm done reading them, I think I need to cut back on the coffee :-) Maybe that will help.

Yesterday's Gifts

Confession: I didn't practice yesterday. However, I got several seemingly miraculous gifts from the buddhas and bodhisattvas, totally out of the blue, to help me with my book. I didn't manage to finish my practice in the am and then all the gift getting took up my whole day. Note to self: FINISH PRACTICE BY 8:30 AM EVERY DAY!!!!

But anyway, it was kind of amazing, I was just sitting at home as usual minding my own business when stuff dropped into my lap and people came over to the house.

I've been stuck on a piece of the plot and I stumbled on something really fun on the internet to move it forward.

Two other gifts are for helping my day trading. My day trading will hopefully fund my ability to live at home and write the book without taking up ALL MY TIME, which is what's happening now. My book is purely a labor of love. I'm not intending to make money off of it and I want to keep the making money part separate from the book writing part.

As an added bonus, the slipcover for the couch came from overstock.com and it matches and fits perfectly! HAHA!!!

First Day of School

Hurray! Today is Alex's first day of high school.

The three of us, my mom, Alex, and I, are happy summer vacation is over. Alex is delighted to get out of the house and be with other kids and have less chores to do each day.

I'm relieved that he is doing something constructive without my having to oversee it. I just have to get him off to school and then I have several completely peaceful hours :-)

Master of the Universe

I've been getting discouraged at how I just can't keep my mind focused on doing what I want to do.

To keep myself doing all the things I am supposed to be doing, my usual method is to whip myself into a frenzy of "shoulds" and "musts" which I have to fulfill in order to be a human being worthy of taking up my share of space on the planet. These then build into a huge ball of anxiety which then drives me to complete my task list in order to relieve my self-induced stress.

However, now that I've renounced stress, I'm realizing how precious little control I have over my mind, and thus, my behavior. I can't stay focused while I'm doing my meditation practice. After practice, I can't keep focused on my task list. I slip up on my lay person's vows. I waste time.

Then I remembered that "To tame this mind of ours, that is the teaching of all the buddhas." That is the essential meaning of all the buddhist teachings distilled into one line. So with great relief, I realized I was just being human. I'll be working on this until I realize the heart of enlightenment. Which in my case, is going to be a very long time.

Now I'm even more motivated to keep developing the stress-free method of making myself do what I want to do through my meditation practice.

To be master of your own mind is to be master of your universe.

Healing

Compared with the emotions, the body heals in a jiffy.

This is both reassuring and disturbing at the same time :-) You mean life won't be magically rosy if I'm healthy? But on the bright side, that means no matter how sick I may be, I can still be happy.

Actually, I don't think you can heal emotions. It seems to be more effective to think of it as getting rid of the negative ones, leaving only the virtuous ones. Or maybe it's more like accepting them all, and not giving any particular ones center stage. Then letting them all just go back where they came from :-)

Taking back my life through taking vows

My life has always run away with me. Ever since I can remember, it ran me around until I was completely exhausted and sleep deprived. I've been in a constant battle trying to take control of it.

I've been listening to Sogyal Rinpoche's many hours of teachings on the practice of refuge. In one of the teachings, he talks about the meaning of taking vows. So today, I decided it might be a good idea to take some basic lay person's vows until I complete my Ngondro. There are five basic vows: not killing, not stealing, no sexual misconduct, no lying, and no intoxicants.

At least the way Rigpa does it, you can sort of set the parameters of the vows you want to take. Basically, at first, you set the bar low enough so that you are fairly confident you can jump over it. So for example, for the vow not to kill, you can vow not to kill humans. My friend said she "hoped?" that it would be easy enough for me to keep that one :-)

Once Rinpoche said, you might be celibate anyway by accident, so you might as well take a vow and get some merit for it! Check ;-) Another easy one!

So I thought about the parameters of all the vows and decided, "I'm going to do it."

Then something magical happened. I felt like I was in control of my life.

!!!!!

I feel as if I am now aware of what what I am doing, and making my own choices. I feel as if I am thinking, saying, and doing things on purpose, instead of forever being carried round and round in circles really fast on a runaway racehorse.

I think that's what taking refuge in the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha is all about.