Rock 'n Roll, Art, Traveling
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Music
Queensryche, H.I.M., Savatage, Jon Oliva's Pain, Circle II Circle, Stevie Nicks, Institute, Epica, Kamelot, Leaves' Eyes, Fates Warning, The 69 Eyes, Soulbender, Nightwish, Pink Cream 69, Firewind, Visions of Atlantis
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Movies
Conspiracy Theory & Vanilla Sky
Television
Anything Reality
Books
90 Minutes in Heaven
This is an excerpt from the book “The Crystal Heart”. It reminds me of the teachings in the book “The Power of Now”. According to an eastern story, when the gods decided to create the Universe, they created the stars, the sun, and the moon. They created mountains and seas and flowers, and clouds. Then they created human beings. And, finally, they created Truth.
Because the search for truth is the greatest adventure in the universe, the gods decided to hide truth, to prolong the search.
‘Let’s put Truth on top of the highest mountain’, said one of the gods. Certainly it will be hard to find it there.’
‘Let’s put it on the farthest star,’ said another.
‘Let’s hide it in the deepest and darkest of caves.’
‘Let’s conceal it on the dark side of the moon.’
At the end, the wisest and most ancient god said, ‘No, we will hide Truth inside the heart of human beings. In this way they will look for it all over the Universe, without being aware of having it inside themselves all the time.’
The process of opening or healing the heart, then, is not merely a process of ‘repairing the damage’. The goal of working on the heart is not to make your life as it is to work better. It is not to fix things. There is nothing to fix.
Opening the heart is to seek Truth at its deepest and most profound level. And in finding the truth, what you will find is that you are already perfect exactly as you are: perfect, with all of your limitations. The purpose of limitation is its capacity to express distinction in order to express uniqueness. You are who you uniquely are because of your limitations. If there were no limitations, everything would simply flow into everything else, and there would be no opportunity for unique self-expression. This was, of course, how the universe was in the beginning—an amorphous mass of energy, with no opportunity for self-discovery.
As your heart opens, as you begin to find and expose deeper and deeper levels of Truth, what will change is your perspective.
As you progress deeper and deeper into the opening process, you will find that you have less and less need to define your experience, and are more content to just let it be however it is. The need to define, to interpret, to analyse, all exist as one level of consciousness. The goal in opening the heart is to shift your level of consciousness. Or, perhaps a bit more accurately, to enable you to discover other levels of consciousness in yourself and to shift into those levels of consciousness at will, according to the appropriateness of the situation in which you find yourself.
NashvilleRock.net: Your new band, SOULBENDER, has released its debut album. What has the reaction been so far to the music and is this a permanent band or just a "one-off" project?
Michael Wilton: "It's a permanent thing and the reaction can be assessed by reading the comments left on the SOULBENDER site on MySpace or CDBaby.com via the official SOULBENDER web site. Every show that we’ve done in the Northwest has been sold out and people have been hammering us to get another record out. We're in the midst of getting something going with another record label to do a tour of more than just the Northwest. SOULBENDER is really a very progressive, hard rock band with very intense musicians. A couple of them are prodigies and it's really been a lot of fun to do."
