Continued at Thinking Differently.blogspot.com

This was the blog I started and used during my 2006 campaign for the office of representative for the district of Waikiki-Kapahulu, and although losing that election handily, kept up the postings until a few months ago, when I wanted to consolidate and refocus my energies on my natural and native interests of conditioning -- and particularly the field I conjured up as "Understanding Conditioning," which is essentially asking the question, "How do we know what we think we know?"

For most people, that is because everybody else has told us so, but often times, what is believed true by everybody, is not what is tested and found to be true in the experience of daily living, but what nobody has taught to question and challenge before. Nowhere is that mentality more true, than in the fields of exercise and conditioning -- for better well-being and fitness. Yet most presume they know what all that entails -- without ever having inquired very deeply, and that key beyond all else, to all understanding is that one first discovers the limits of their own knowing that enables one to find out.

One never bothers to learn, unless they realize they don't know. But in presuming to know, they will never bother to find out, because their minds are already closed to that possibility. The closed mind is a very limited mind -- that thinks what they know, is all that can be known -- instead of only what they know.

There was a time even in recent memory, in which there were places in the world in which it was still possible to be unaware of most of the world -- and live blissfully in that state, that even in places like Hawaii, are now crumbling because of their insistence on maintaining that ignorance. So while they may call their society and government a democracy, people don't think for themselves but think, do and say what others tell them to -- as the only expression and choice they have ever known.

Of course it's not a choice -- but that is what they've been conditioned to believe is their choice. That variation on the theme is being played out in many other predemocratic societies -- in which people think "democracy" is their right to force everybody else to think, do and say what they want others to.

The essential democracy is really about the control and power over one's own thinking and actions -- and not how many others they can force to do their will.

In that manner, the representation of one's own ideas, are just as vital a part of the that democracy, and so I continued to express another viewpoint as what a good representative should do -- regardless of whether most other people think he should or not. And so that has become a crisis now in Hawaii when it is faced with monumental challenges -- yet nobody knows how to break out of the cycles of the past because they all think the same, and there are no ideas other than "Give us more money."