A Midwest Journal

The trick in living is to live.

Lester Levenson pointed out many things when he developed his Sedona Method, chief of these is that we are working to get security, approval, or control with almost everything we think or feel or strive for.

Once you get beyond (or while you work at getting beyond) these three, then life gets a lot easier. Levenson said that the next point so conquer was any fear of death.

And you’ll see when you look up the saints, prophets, and true seers for our planet’s history, this is always true. (Of course we are dealing with direct quotes here, writings we know they actually authored.) The legends of these people can amplify what they covered, how they acted, but it’s the same basic concepts. Even if you read biographies of the successful, you’ll find these same points.

They don’t need approval, they aren’t worried about their security, they aren’t escaping control or trying to control something – they just are. And they live in personal peace and with a very calm joy. They embody personal freedom.  They have everything they need or want, but spend most of what they acquire or accomplish on helping others with their lives.

Levenson said that one of the routes to enlightenment, to real personal freedom, was to live your life as a Master would. “Master” in this case are any of the myriad people we historically look up to. Because if you seek to live as a saint, all manner of stuff would come up for you to release. But as you continued to release, then all these would drop away and eventually, your inner Master would show through in everything you do or say, in all your beingness.

Funny that all of our hate, jealousy, bitterness – all this is simply made up. It’s not real. Any problems you are having out in the world are the result of your simply setting up these thought processes long ago. All life is really easy – if you are releasing as you go through it.

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I’m planning to do a full study of all this entails and to blog it here. Essentially, this will be the last version of “Go Thunk Yourself!” which need be written and published. Because Levenson is down to the bedrock of self help and we need nothing else.

This ties into Intuitional Living quite nicely.

And as my world becomes more peaceful, I hope to share this with you. It’s hard to beat living in the country on a farm and growing living things. Long walks while checking fence almost never fail to give inspiration – if I’m listening. And that, as I said, has long been the problem – learning how to listen.

My dreams often inspire me to blog, as this early am before breakfast and first coffee. But telling you what I’ve been discovering has been a way to improve the world and to help. You can see why the title of this piece. Quit living for the approval, security, or to get control (or escape control) of this world.

Start living with it and you’ll see it goes much, much easier.

While it may not always seem this happy, just sticking with the tides of Intuitional Living brings more peace than consternation.

I was all excited (so to speak) about following my bliss with this Intuitional Living stuff and then hit a rant that kept coming up. You see, I thought that this type of lifestyle was simply going to be peaceful and joyous and all that.

Forgot about the baggage we are all carrying around – all those mental habits of thinking all the time for a lifetime. Don’t figure that these will go away overnight.

But the trick and cure with the Sedona Method is to simply look at what is coming up and then release it as it does.

Intuitionally, the best way to get it released is to bring it to the surface.  It’s that old phrase “God’s Will” or “Moving with the Spirit” or some such.

What you get with Intuitional Living is a completely independent and mutually interacting lifestyle. Intuition flows through all of us. We are all interconnected, but not interdependent.  So several people acting on Intuition can show up to help someone in need – same time, same place, all there “accidentally”. Like that “Miracle on the Hudson” – a pilot who had trained his entire life just for that one particular situation. Post-grad degrees and extra studies, etc. All lives saved. Same river a few months later and you see a small plane blind-siding a copter while the supposed air traffic controller was on the phone with someone else.  All lives lost. Same river.

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It came to me this morning (which is why I’m up early blogging) – Government is the Will of the People, but when that Will gets sufficiently strong, there is no longer any need for Government.

On a small scale, I’m checking this out on our farm. We get a few hundred bucks every year because we tell the FSA what crops we put in and they tell us if there is a Loan Deficiency Payment. And in return, we agree not to sell anything directly off that land (like planting sweet corn instead of commodity yellow corn.) Every time you agree with the government for anything, you give something else up.

Now sure, with Katrina, the Coast Guard was doing great plucking people out. But if those people were truly following their Intuition, they wouldn’t have been in trouble, would they? Or they would have been able to rescue themselves. You don’t hear about the people who got out ahead of the storm or simply rode it out and rebuilt their homes without anyone else’s assistance.

All Government (and Mainstream Media) talks about are the few who can’t do anything for themselves. But that’s the wrong approach. Of course they are going to do that – those are people who need government to survive.

But does that give them any right to rip off others, take their money away by duress (what happens if you don’t pay taxes?) – when those people have never educated themselves to deal with life? Instead of running some training programs so people can get out of the poor mental habits which keep them poor – they start Welfare. And everyone else pays while they have children out of wedlock.

OK, this is turning into another deal altogether. Back to the farm. When we looked over the programs we could get into, we found that more and more we were being told we could do this or that and not the other. We were actually being given the choice of giving up our own independence in order to get the “security” and approval of these government people.  (And a little bit of money to sweeten the pot.)

I had a guy out to give me some advice about how to improve drainage on my farm. He said that because these low areas flooded once a year, they were “wetlands” and so I couldn’t do so-and-so with them – that he had to check his books for the statutes. All I wanted to do was to trim some trees so it would get back into it’s normal drainage patterns rather than start new ones.

Not like I’m draining a swamp where extremely rare and exotic wildlife live.

That’s government. Non-intuitional. Very much over-thought.

But is my life improved by getting out of government programs? Sure. Less payroll taxes if you work for yourself or as a contractor. Save up if you want to replace your own Social Security program. Like Insurance – if you have the money to pay directly, you’ll actually save money by not paying all those premiums.

Life insurance is for what – pay off your bills and funeral costs when you are dead, plus leave a little for those you left.  How about setting up what you own as an LLC or corporation and including them as stockholders, and deeding over your controlling stock to them when you are gone? Means no real estate tax if  you set it up right. Have that corporation pay for your funeral.

Taxes, as I’ve often said, just get the stupid rich, not the smart ones. Smart ones don’t “own” anything and so aren’t worth being sued or taxed. (And high taxes on millionaires just makes them move out of state – ask California.)

Government needs you, you don’t need it. Check out TOLFA.us for the theory behind this.  I’m into philosophy and can’t easily be bothered with this stuff (just bothered by it, as you can tell – need to do more releasing…)

There’s an old phrase for dealing with coyotes – the three S’s: Shoot ‘em, Shovel ‘em, and Shut up. I can harvest all the deer I want on my own property if 1) I wanted to hunt them, 2) No one saw me, 3) I didn’t tell anyone. (Plus, I’d have to process my own meat.)  Deer are a runaway nuisance, but you have to get a permit to hunt them. We are their only predators, but are only allowed to hunt them in certain times of the year and only so many at a time.  (Heck, I usually pick up several a year that other hunters throw out on the sides of the back roads because they don’t have enough tickets. Wasted – and smelly.)

The argument against this is like the buffalo – but independent ranchers saved that species, not any amount of government intervention. There are domesticated deer now.  But I’m way off the beat here. (And I’ll have the wacko enviro-extremists camped out here any minute now… “Save Bambi!”)

Look, just live your life the way it makes sense to you. Get rid of all these negative emotions hanging around and quit chasing the thrill-ride adrenaline rushes of the top end as well. Live that normal, calm, peaceful existence you know is within you.

Doesn’t mean you trip to that state will be like floating down a sedate river on a balmy afternoon – sometimes you’ll hit the rapids. But just ride them out, enjoy the trip, don’t freak out. Release all the time.

And you’ll make it.

(photo credit: Ricardo Galli)

Just to update you on my farming – and how I’m not so worried about today’s downturned economy and all those Beltway knuckleheads we elected.

Mostly, by figuring out how not to do commodity farming, I’ve been cutting my expenses over the last few years. By about two-thirds. Essentially, I’ve learned to start raising grass-fed beef instead of trying to compete with the corn-fed crowd.

I’ve gone from two plots of 30 acres each down to 3 plots of 15 acres each – with three rotated crops instead of two. And the result is that I’m only paying to have two of them custom planted and harvested (as well as sprayed) in any given year. So I’ve cut my off-site investments in half.

Then, I went and bought me an old square baler, so I can put up my own hay and not pay for this as well. And learned to stretch out my haying season so I’m not rushing around to put it up all at once. I’ve got a neighbor last year to put it up on shares (he took half), which worked out pretty well. If I cut and rake it ahead of him, I get 2/3′ds. I don’t pay for his repairs or fuel.

This year I learned from my failed crop. The corn got drowned out. So I turned the cows in on it and let them finish it off. Did a nice job. Saved me four weeks of feeding hay. Now, if I’d been just raising grass for cattle, I’d not have lost anything. Just turn them in after the ground was firm enough to walk on, and they’d grow pounds of beef of whatever was out there. Put that low ground into pasture and take my high ground back for row crops. And the cattle clean up between the trees and such – where I can’t realistically grow row crops because it’s too steep.

Instead of giving up half my calf crop to pay my feed bill, I’ve been raising them up as stocker cattle (about 3/4’s the weight of a fat steer) and selling them for slightly less than I would as fat cattle. Means I make nearly twice as much off the same calf crop. And I’ve cut my inputs by feeding them out on pastures instead of corn rations. They stay healthier and I have fewer vet bills. No implants, hormones, or antibiotics – just grass and water.

Now, you don’t see above that we are actually making money off this farm, yet. Costs are still above what it takes to run it. The cows pay for themselves, as do the row crops – but equipment costs, electricity, all the main house costs are funded elseways. And I don’t get a dime from farming, just my room and board.

So I need to keep another job for my spending money (and to pay for this Internet connection).

I was working at a local warehouse, but finally quit this and got a freelance job doing web design. About time, since I actually talked about this in a 2003 paper on rural economics – written when I was going to school and only working warehouse part-time. Five years later, I’m putting my actual theory to work.

And since online spending continues to grow overall, I’m in the right area.

That’s how I’m surviving this silly economic downturn. Recession/Depression – just a bunch of Beltway nonsense. Those of us who can’t simply print more money are a bit more close-pursed about what goes in and out.

So quit listening to your news and vote out of office any politician who has been there more than two terms. That’s my policy on politics. Keeps me on an even keel.

Luck to you, too.

(PS. no that’s not my laptop. I’m running only desktops here – most of them a few years old and doing just fine, thank you.)

Worked this weekend while working at my day job. (Just my style, multi-tasking at Internet Marketing and web design while pushing boxes around a warehouse, taking hundred-pound-plus boxes onto a 3×4 pallet at 30 feet – the lighter ones can be 80 feet up…)

The latest incarnation of an online marketing plan takes all the elements of an Online Marketing Plan, but now looks backward from the SEO tactics of Michael Campbell and Dr. Andy Williams.

Your base is to work out how to get these mini-webs/mini-nets into play with all the other venues of attracting viewers and getting sales leads/subscribers.

Mini-webs/Mini-nets are a sort of Google food. One that this search engine likes. Properly constructed, it both feeds the current need for keyword-centric searches and the nascent use of LSI/theme-based content (which is only going to continue to evolve).

Since over 80% of most web-site traffic is from search engines (your mileage may vary), we not only give our attention to external links, but also then build a nice little link-controlled web/net which flows pagerank upwards to key pages – thus increasing their value to the search engines (particularly Google, the 800-pound gorilla sitting stage-left).

This mini-web/net isn’t just bait, it actually feeds the basic algorithms which Google uses, at least the current evolution. Now it is food because it is based on the three needs of the Internet which the users defined long ago: Information, Choice, and Timeliness. These join together at the hip to form the subject known as Content.

You are constantly building more content, which continues to feed the search engines and give you more page rank. You are building, on a timely basis, a huge site. And it’s built on human standards – which the search engines are set for. (They long ago started getting hip to the spammers and hijackers, who utilize the capacities of computer-generated speed to flood the search engines with some sort of short-cut they recently discovered. Then the search engines respond with bans, de-listing, and other counter-tactics.

The secret is to be human.

Humans only do things at a regular pace. They can only code so fast. They like and dislike various things. And know when content is useful or not.

Google has even started employing people who use their search engine to find web sites and rate them. Those which don’t fit the bill are penalized. Over-optimized pages can lose page rank and even get banned.

So design and build like humans do. Means you use articles that make sense and are written to be understood. While you can use emphasis now and then, you use pronouns when they are called for and not just use your keyword over and over and over. You don’t plop down 300 pages all at once.

Articles show up ok, since they have to be (for the most part) human reviewed and moderated. Since they have duplicate content filters, this tends to weed (and penalize) the whole article directory field. [Ezinearticles.com tends to rise above this, but they are unique in their ability to rise above the common...]

Again, you have to work through the attempts to “hack” this system. You want to produce great, fresh content that is useful to users. And produce this only on a human scale. Of course, corporations are forgiven, as they often will launch a vast amount of re-designed and added pages at a single whack. But we aren’t talking corporate, we are talking individual.

Now we are just the simple people, individuals. And the work we do is for our own progress, our own financial gain. And of course, to get this gain by being of service to others…

And so we work on an individual basis – at that individual speed – which should be just fine for our needs. The thing is to pace yourself and so get all your needs covered. How this is done? Simply get one mini-web per product line up and running every week. And your articles and a Squidoo page posted, as well as any blog mentions you’d like.

Lots of work to do.

But you can get it all done if you work out a logical sequence. Working from an existing product (or an affiliate’s):

0. Given that you’ve already researched your keywords,
1. Create a mini-web which utilizes these, and links to your product’s sales page. Go ahead and post this. (Time – a few hours of one day, once you get used to the sequence.)
2. Post a press release about this. Do up a podcast giving your breakthrough on this – have someone interview you if you can.
3. Post to your blog, linking in the podcast. Supposing we are promoting our latest book, make this a book review. Link into all pages of your latest mini-web.
4. Create a Squidoo lens out of the book review. Link to your blog, product sales page, and every mini-web page.
5. Write about five articles or so – link to the landing page, your main web site, and of course to an opt-in page to get their address (with a suitable bribe). Get these all posted, one at a time, to each of the five main article directories. Then the next, then the next, etc. Don’t post all five to one directory at once – looks like you’re spamming.
6. Do up a media release so you can line up and get radio interviews. (Book authors are usual suspects at this – being an expert on what you just wrote and everything.)
7. Set up your own affiliate sales (thank you page, download link, etc.) and modify your mini-web for this. Also update your master affiliate page, if you have one.
8. Option: do up a full set of MP3’s and offer this as a kit – through your mini-web (update) and also through your affiliates (update).
9. Option: create an online course (autoresponder delivered) and update your mini-web and affiliate pages/links.

Then you are able to cross connect these different product-types, particularly if you have a page to link in your MP3’s and online course to your book itself. You would have a MP3 series for each book, as well as an online course for each book. So a person could be interested in MP3’s, books, or online courses – and so flip to different types of this product instead of only accessing through your one book page. This also gives you some very interesting options for pagerank building.

Anyway, that’s the long and short of it. Of course you social book mark everything as you go. And you could comment market instead of article marketing, if you wanted.

The thing is to give you options, plus a way to get maximal marketing going on. I use a book in this, as I write books – and am way behind, now, in marketing them. But at least now I know how.

As I have three product lines of books, I can then spend one day each on just marketing them. I’d take another day to send broadcasts to each of these different lists and as well the last day (of my five-day workweek) working on new products. Once I get these up and running, making money hand-over-fist, I can then simply quit my (weekend) day job and have more time for all this (or just some time for myself…).

But you can see how to do it, now, can’t you. Somewhere, you have to fit in time to keep abreast of things – but as we get faster at page/site building and posting, there will be more time to do that type of thing. As I said, you and I probably have a great deal of catch-up to do, just getting our existing web-sites optimized properly.

By adding a mini-web every week, you build a mini-net in short order – about 50 mini-webs a year. And so you then add a great deal of pagerank to everything – which gives you more people finding you on the search engines.

Tomorrow, I hope to tell you something about climbing the search engine rankigns via keywords which these above guru’s don’t explain too well, but you can use for yourself….