TOP SECRET... the only real people are the ones you can hug.
The Sun sees the moon, and earth is the Sun's imagination.
My good friends are not afraid to fly close to the Sun, and my best friends can fly through the Sun.
Clothes, food, and shelter is all I need in life. Being joyful, those 3 things are guaranteed, and money becomes nothing.
Craig Grant in 1991
1991 – 16 years old. I started getting into music and dancing. I was known by my friends as a very good hip hop dancer. I organized a dance team with 8 of my friends, we practiced after school and WON the school talent show dancing a choreographed routine. That was a big event for me. My girlfriend Tamarah was in middle school. I flirted with many girls in my High School. I continued my computer studies taking advanced computer science classes in school. I also got into drama and did school plays. I lived in a suburban neighborhood called Royal Palm Beach, there I hung out with allot of white and Jamaican friends. The girls were easy going and fun to be with because their families already had $$. My mother was studying to become and Registered Nurse and working 12 hour days.
I learned to drive from my mother and taking driving class in high school. One month before turning 16 I bought my first car for $500 from my friend and neighbor Andre. It was a 1979 2 door Buick Regal, and a gas guzzler. I bought it with money I made working at Winn Dixie grocery store as a bag boy. In school I continued with cross country and joined the Science club. My after school activities included cross country training and drama practice. I spent the best times sneaking into my girlfriends window at night to have sex all night then leave in the morning before everyone wakes up.
I started dancing for a local rap group, they were also from my high school. I started hanging out more with black Americans. I was spending allot of time in the ghetto part of West Palm Beach, and I learned allot about crime and drug dealing. I fell in love with doing music and started focusing most of my time and energy into it. I started writing rhymes and developing my lyrical and rapping skills. I formed a rap group called “Chosen Chiefs Of Flayva” with 3 other guys from my neighborhood, we all had the same east cost rap style. We were very hip hop. We spent allot of time dancing, writing rhymes, and watching rap videos. We went to the studio and recorded our first song.
I started to do shoplifting to get $$. I would steal jeans from department stores and then return them to get $$cash, it worked in those days, not any more. I showed my friends this and they started doing it. I worked allot of part time jobs on and off. At home I was upgrading my computer skills, I became very proficient in using DOS operating system and knew how to build my own IBM compatible PC. I was a computer nerd behind closed doors.
Peace is positive self interest now, and war is negative ideas about others.
Imagination can be a powerful addiction. I know my experience is now.
Life is an endless, artistic, natural cycle of creation and destruction.
Follow @craig-grant
That is life lesson. I am not there yet but slowing getting there.
takes a long time for sure
I enjoy your take on things, you are very creative and fun to watch. You have brought up a lot of interesting things to think about and debate, I think this is a great thing about the blogging and vlogging.
This post kind of reminds me a bit about a conversion I once had as a child with my dad. I asked him why we all couldn’t just wander around from place to place and live off the land, hunting fishing and eating berries. Kind of the advanced concept of “freedom and prosperity” where everything comes your way just by the movement of your physical body.
His reply was that the earth’s ability to sustain us all in this way was reached many years ago and only by our intellectual abilities, social structures and advanced technologies can we hope to sustain the enormous population that we now have. (conversion circa 1970)
At this point with upwards of 7 billion of us on the planet just wandering around and supporting our freedom and prosperity through our physical efforts alone seems like a pipe dream. ;) I believe we are going to need to fix some things pretty quickly and it may take some serious cooperation and brain power to identify where we can make beneficial changes and then implement them imho.
Your dad is right that 7 billion people cant do it, but 1 person can, or a family of 5 can if they choose to live that way, and that is what is important, personal choice. The world is imaginary, there is no way I can physically experience 100,000 people all at the time, so living my life based on what I can imagine to exist and not actually does exist is like being lost in my imagination, like being a character in the background of a video game, while the main character plays for one self. The world is only as big as what I can physically experience, accepting this is how one can move thru the world and everything is provided no matter what.
Good point, I’m enjoying the conversation! A significant number of the world population could live this way - in fact a number of expatriates seem to be adopting this lifestyle by cashing in all their acquired goods and living in a banana republic somewhere. Everything is provided so long as we don’t reach a major supply problem brought about by some tipping point of over consumption of the worlds resources.
Ultimately I agree with you that everything is imaginary because everything that happens outside is reflected as thoughts and mental formations inside and this is the only thing with which we can experience the world. Yet there are certain fundamental physical laws and statistical occurrences that it would be best not to ignore if we wish to provide a level of peace, harmony and prosperity for the majority of the worlds population. I don’t think we can work our way through this only in a physical way but who knows, I’m a bit tired of thinking about it. ;)
You have a very profound phrases @craig-grant
There is a lot wrong with what you say (or maybe how you say it?) but it's your opinion. I'll express what is wrong with it in this list of points. Yes physical activity is linked to freedom and prosperity, but that is not the same statement as saying thinkers do not deserve freedom and prosperity. On one side of the coin you say something obviously true but on the other side of the coin you say something arbitrary, subjective, and the word deserve is imprecise, like justice.
Diversified sources of income
I agree on this. We need diversified sources of income. But I guess I'm disagreeing with how you chose to express yourself. My point only is that compared to a 9-5 "bullshit" or "meaningless" job, blogging for a lot of people in toxic work environments is a massive level up. And for a lot of people, the computer or Internet is the first step to freedom, primarily because it's a place where a smart person can find an opportunity, but this isn't the same as encouraging people to "depend" on the computer, or Steemit, or any particular income stream. If a person can get income from many diverse sources, online, offline, of course that is more free than to only get income from the computer.
Relationship with money
In my opinion the purpose of money is as a means to an end. If it produces freedom then it's doing it's job. The Internet, Steemit, any piece of software, hardware, any ideology or religion, any politics, at least in my opinion, are means to achieving some end. From an ethical nihilist perspective, I cannot tell anyone what their meaning is or if there should be an end, but I do think if someone has the end of being free, then Steemit by design can help some people achieve that end. If Steemit doesn't liberate, if it's not a liberating technology, then it's not worth anything to people who work primarily for the actualization of freedom.
I don't know anyone who would trade places with Stephan Hawking, he is bad example to use for freedom and prosperity
Everyone who wants to be rich to save the world should watch this video and anyone who is rich but currently unable to understand why their friends and family don't understand freedom and prosperity should also watch this video.