The Good, The Bad & The Labels

I came home from work Thursday and my wife was in our bathroom getting ready for work, she works nights. I sit on the edge of the bed while our son is occupying himself with his toy cars, and my wife Jenni asks a simple question…how was your day?

I immediately thought back on the various things that occurred that day. My employee who had broken his wrist the weekend before came in after getting his cast on and said he wasn’t sure if he could work with the restrictions from the doctor and a useless had (his job requires lifting heavy odd sized objects). I had my normal Thursday morning meeting as well that day and it was nothing special. I was stressed because I now had 3 printers to run, instead of just worrying about my 2, I had the big flatbed that my guy normally runs. That kept me busy and it was a tad stressful keeping it all running smoothly. On top of that my office had started a Biggest Loser competition and I was 4 days into a new diet and learning how to read/watch my calories, etc. I then had to leave early to get home so she could get to work, which usually isn’t a problem because my guy is still there getting jobs printed and everyone is being taken care of so I can step out. However, he was gone so my department was shutdown 1.5 hours earlier than usual, which tends to make the designers panic because they always worry a customer will call with a last minute rush and they’ll have to say no because no one is there to print it.

Okay, so all that goes through my head and at the end of the thought I reply to her with this: “oh man, I had a really bad day”.

I look back on it now and remember the rest of the night. Jenni was at work, I was taking care of our son and was thinking to myself that I deserved to rest because “I had a bad day”. I did absolutely nothing productive that night. I wasn’t as attentive to my son as I should have been. I didn’t get any laundry washed, I didn’t start a load of dishes. I was a bum.

I realize looking back that it all started with me deciding that I had to label my day as a bad one. With that label securely in place I allowed myself to use it as an excuse to not accomplish anything positive that night…which carried over to the next day. Why do I have to do that? Why do I have to choose to label something as good or bad. Maybe my day was neither good nor bad really, it just was what it was…a day. Nothing more, nothing less. Now please don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying anything negative towards my wife asking the question. She was genuinely interested in the experiences of my day. I just realized for myself that I am constantly labeling people, events, even days of my life with Good or Bad. One little word or label puts an entire spin on my perspective. This isn’t to say having a positive outlook is a negative thing, but I just wonder why it is that I feel the need to label everything?

• My day was bad
• My meeting was boring
• My coworker is cocky
• I’m fat
• Life is pointless
• Brussel sprouts are nasty

Maybe I’m going overboard here, but honestly, look at the list. I have created a mental/verbal label for each item, which immediately changes my outlook because I focus on the label and don’t see what’s really there. My day was bad. I had some unpleasant moments of stress, but that okay. There were also moments where I smiled and enjoyed my time working. My coworker is an incredibly talented artist and designer, but I have labeled him as cocky, so that’s all I see. I’m blinded by the label and am unable or unwilling to see the beauty within him. I’m fat…yes, I’m not at a healthy weight, but do I have to apply such a negative label to myself? Is that really helping anything or anyone? Is life really pointless? No it’s not, but I’ve decided at that moment that this is the only view I wish to have, instead of choosing to see all the wonderful things within it. Are brussel sprouts nasty? Well, I don’t particularly enjoy them, but my wife loves them, so are they really nasty? No, I just don’t enjoy eating them. Do you see what I’m saying?

I’ve decided that I need to stop labeling everything and just live. Labels are hindering my progression as a father, as a husband, as an employee and as a conscious human being. If something is merely creating a road block in your life, then why do we continue to hold on to it?

Wordpress 2.5 RC1

As you may have noticed, when you go to the main domain it now forwards you to the “/blog” folder. This is where I have the install of 2.5 RC1. I’m someone who loves to tinker with the latest and greatest on software, so I just had to install this. I was pleasantly surprised that the theme ported over just fine. I know a lot of themes and plugins are not working properly. So far so good. I still have the old one in place, I haven’t moved anything, so it actually may get confusing if you follow old links. I’ll worry about that later as it’s not like I get much traffic at this point.

If you have any problems at all, please let me know. You can email me at the following address:

scott at (the domain of this site)

Sorry, have to do something so the bots don’t pick it up and I start getting spam. Thanks!

Where In God’s Name Did We Go Wrong?

By Jean-Claude Koven

When people ask me if I am religious, I tell them I love God far too much to be religious. “Oh, then you must believe in God?” they inevitably ask. “Of course not,” I reply with a smile, “does a fish believe in water?” For me, God is all there is. What’s to believe?

Although the world’s major religions all agree that God (however they define the term) is omnipresent, it seems that very few of their followers – including their clerical hierarchy – actually understand what omnipresence really means. And therein lies the source of the world’s ills.

For a start, we take our relationship to God far too seriously. We bring so much solemnity to the way we view God – awe, veneration, obedience, and the like – that we end up creating distance between us and the object of our worship. Expressions such as “God is my judge,” “God forbid,” and “God bless you” creep into our language, and consequently our thoughts. People are actually proud to call themselves God-fearing folk. For too many of us, God is somewhere out there, watching and judging us as we struggle through our imperfect lives.

And consider this: Some religions consider the name of God so holy that it is never pronounced. Instead they create a litany of substitute terms so they can talk about God without having to commit the blasphemy of actually using his name – much as many of the characters in the Harry Potter novels avoid pronouncing the name of Lord Voldemort lest they unleash some fearsome effect. When practitioners of these religions write about their deity, they are instructed to omit the vowel: G-d. Other religions take the opposite tack. They encourage their devotees to chant or meditate on the name of God for hours at a time. To their way of believing, focusing on God leads to a state of bliss that opens the door to transcendence and enlightenment. But if God is truly all that is, what can possibly make one of his names more powerful than any other?

For that matter, what is the purpose of naming him (or her or it) in the first place? Naming anything creates a subject/object relationship between you and the thing named, and that in and of itself means a separation. Every name of God, no matter how holy, drives a wedge between the creator and the created – which includes you and me. This separation is the primal breeding ground for fear, for we then see ourselves as tiny beings, abandoned (or evicted from Paradise) and living on the fringe of an incomprehensibly huge cosmos. It’s no wonder most of humanity takes this whole God business so seriously – it appears to be no less than a matter of life and death.

But what if the phrase “God is all that is” were literally true? This is what R. Buckminster Fuller must have understood when he said, “God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun.” His words, when I first read them, lodged in my mind. But I didn’t get their full import until many years later, during my first visit to Findhorn, the renowned spiritual community in northeast Scotland. It was there, sitting in a circle with my fellow newbies, that the penny dropped. One young man in our group, Peter, suddenly exclaimed, “Oh, wow, I finally see it. It’s not that God is in all things; it’s that God is all things.”

His exclamation triggered two remarkable realizations for me. First, the obvious is obvious only to those who are sufficiently present to see it. The delivery of Peter’s life-changing epiphany had virtually no effect on the rest of the group. Our facilitator was so consumed by his orientation agenda that he missed the moment completely. Thanking Peter for his contribution, he simply asked the group if anyone else had anything to share.

Second, what Peter said is literally true. In an instant, Bucky’s words became crystal clear. God is indeed a verb. He is not the creator. He is the ongoing unfoldment of creation itself. There is nothing that is not a part of this unfolding. Thus there can be nothing separate from God. God is infinite and infinity is One.

From that moment, everything in my life began to change. It wasn’t immediate; it was rather like a giant oil tanker slowly making a U-turn. As if I were facing in a new direction, I looked at the world in a new way “How,” I asked myself, “do we dupe ourselves so completely? How come so few people see what Bucky and Peter see? How could I myself have been so blind?”

When we perceive God as a noun, we envision him as the creator, the architect of, and therefore separate from, his creation. Identifying ourselves as part of that creation, we see ourselves not only separate from our source but separate from each other and all other manifest things as well. This is the fatally flawed axiom underlying virtually all of the world’s faiths. They may collectively call for love and peace, but the rampant divisiveness, greed, and competition that currently pervade human culture are the only inevitable outcomes of their separative philosophies.

Once I viewed God as a verb instead of a noun, my perception of life shifted. Everything around me, manifest or no, became God. There was only God. When someone spoke to me, it was with God’s voice; when I listened, it was with God’s heart. I invite you to try it. The small shift from noun to verb may well be the antidote to the forbidden fruit that banished us from Eden. As you begin to view God not as the creator but as the constantly changing dance of creation itself, you’ll discover him in everything you see – including yourself. The old you – that fish swimming blindly in search of water – fades away as you dissolve into the simple meaning of it all. Perhaps, when your vision finally clears, you will find yourself living in the Promised Land that so many others are still praying for.

©2005. Jean-Claude Koven / All Rights Reserved. This article is copyrighted, but you have permission to share it through any medium as long as the proper copyright and credit line is included.

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Jean-Claude Koven is a writer and speaker based in Rancho Mirage, CA. He is the author of Going Deeper: How to Make Sense of Your Life When Your Life Makes No Sense, the Allbooks Reviews editor’s choice for the best metaphysical book of 2004. Recipient of USABookNews.com best metaphysical book award. For more information, please visit www.goingdeeper.org