I came across a piece of writing by an unknown author. The original is here:

I loved it and gave it my own little tweaks to convey what I frequently try to convey here.

A hero is only an ordinary human who does the right thing consistently.

Non-truth is what changes through time.
Truth is the permanent basics of reality, realized by wisdom through generations.
(if you care enough to look)
(if you care enough to be wise)

All our “tricks” have been changing for thousands of years.
The old teachings stay as the cat is let out.
What we need to pay attention to,
is here, is now
our being and us applying them.

Heroes may not always win,
but they never lose.

Happy This Year, everyone. And because it’s the beginning of the year, the topic in of everyone’s mouth is again the “new year evolution”.

Now, whether it’s that, or you simply want to make any change, or doing what you do better, or simply just being. The following should be relevant.

There is a big difference…

…from not knowing to knowing.
…from knowing to doing.
…from doing it once to doing it often.
…from doing it often to doing it all the time.

Furthermore, the degree to which you are completely “here” with the doing, or in other words, the degree of your sincereness in the moment will determine how well the result maybe.

Mind you, I am not talking about real snow. I am talking about all the DHTML snowflakes that many websites and blogs are having for the Christmas season.

Why am I cursing?

Because every time I go to one of these sites, I can see my CPUs (Core 2 T7200 2.0GHz) going from idle to 25% usage — meaning half of one CPU. Yes, I am a big geek with a CPU monitor on my desktop.

Even though modern machines have plenty of computing power to generate these effects without slowing down. But think about millions of people around the world visiting these websites, increasing CPU power consumption. What wastefulness! And they are not even pretty but distraction against the text I want to read. Let alone some people have the fake white snowflakes against white background?

Let alone the power we are already spending on lightings and shit.

Oh, what harmful nature of ignorance and unawareness, albeit unintended.

Ok, done with my rant for the day.

It had occurred to me that, all the “must” in our lives — in the sense that we HAVE TO DO — cause us to take actions that squeeze and eliminate the meaning of whatever we are doing. Or in other words, our “musts” take the purity of the original intention** out of our being and doing.

When we must be happy, we lose happiness in that we fail to continuously sustain ourselves in a happy state and suffer horribly.

When we must be rich, money loses its meaning — to be a useful tool in our life — because just about everything and all our doing become a mean to conserve, hoard, or gain money however possible… turning us into something not quite human.

When we must be successful, it’s guaranteed that you will get that empty feeling when you eventually get there.

We we must be “in a relationship”, the relationship itself loses its purity in that our attention and sincerity are no longer on the other person.

When we must donate and devote ourselves to others, charity and generosity almost seem hollow and artificial.

When we must live (as if we are not alive already), for as long as possible, we do everything and anything that squeeze the life out of ourselves and are therefore completely unhappy, unfulfilled, and miserable.

So, shall we still “must”?

**See When the Intention is Pure, the Action Follows for the idea of intention.

Financial industry, if we shall even call it industry, as it is now, does less than contribute values to the general community. That much is clear.

I am not saying they cannot turn a profit. I really don’t mind them making profits, even off from me. We all need to make a living after all because money buys us food, shelter, and all. But moderation is always the virtue and what they had done and are still trying to do is by no way reasonable.

What is a concrete example you may ask? Well, look here.

This is the result of a transaction through Morgan Stanley Smith Barney (oh what a long name) that I must use in order to deal with company’s restricted stocks. Instead of one reasonable transaction fee, we got Commissions, Other Fee, Transaction Fees, and Service Fee. And this is not including the Proceeds Delivery Fee of $25 if I had chosen to do a wire transfer to my own bank account. Instead, I choose to be patient to receive the proceeds by mail.

My question is, why all the fees? And commission with service fee on top? How much did they do for me? We all know all these are done electronically now. Sure, you need to pay people to maintain the systems, but instead of being sensible charging one single reasonable transaction fee, we have all these. And this is exactly what our financial industry, our banking system does. On top of interest, they charge all sorts of fee for all sorts of occasions and transactions, or just about any time money passes hands, to drive up profits unreasonably and forever.

But we all know perfectly well that nothing in this world can go up and grow forever.

This is exactly what has driven the market to the ground. In a nutshell, the banks and investment firms make billions off transaction fee for creating/underwriting CDOs ranging from 1-1.5%. So they went nuts to lend out mortgages, and then hype up the demand and price of CDOs backed by these [unreliable] mortgages (bubble) to sell and exchange a shit load of them so then they get those fee. In between, banks and companies add financial products such as credit swaps and insurance for these derivatives which result in even more profits through fee while providing them the illusions that they are protected from the CDOs’ risk… But finally they run out of people to lend mortgages, plus unreliable lenders start defaulting, plus themselves and others realizing this cannot go on forever and BAM. (I may not be fully accurate and politically correct with these terms but this is the gist of it.)

Until CEOs, bankers, and all these investing “experts” and “gurus” and “managers” learn to be reasonable and sensible, or be replaced by ones who are, we are in it for a turbulent ride where they will do anything and everything to hoard and extract money.

I say in this blog title that they extract values not simply because they hoard money. They extract values from society because:

• They are hoarding money beyond enough for themselves, meaning either they have little to no values or they are destroying them in process of hoarding.
• To hoard, they would make others not have enough money, and how much energy, time, and money can people afford to develop values when they are preoccupied about surviving.
• Eventually, they would have destroyed money, wealth, values, and lives for everyone including themselves.

And let’s be honest with ourselves, beyond a certain amount of money for food, shelter, other life necessities, and perhaps some indulgence, what more do you need money for?

These are things that will never be taught or promoted by mass media, social institutions because as of yet, our so-called economy is kept alive by irrational and excessive consumption. Enough and reasonable be damned. Intelligent populace aware of how everything works and are inter-connected be damned.